Sprites, Elves and Jets

the BBC has an article about thunderstorms, as seen from above:

"They are slightly different to lightning," Dr Neubert told BBC News. "It's a pulse of the electric field that travels up. For the sprite - when the atmosphere gets thin, the field can get a discharge." Sprites appear milliseconds after a powerful cloud-to-ground lightning strike. Elves, on the other hand, are caused by the electromagnetic pulse the strike produces. A brief, aurora-like expanding halo in the ionosphere, they occur too quickly to be spotted by the human eye and last less than a millisecond.