VLF signatures of ionospheric disturbances associated with sprites Reply

The comment by R. L. Dowden does not properly represent the results presented in our recent paper [Inan ct al., 1995] and attempts to prematurely classify the VLF events reported in our papers as being produced by elves. There is no experimental evidence that the VLF events reported in our papers are necessarily associated with the optical phenomena of elves. In our recent paper [Inan et al., 1996a] we provide a physically based mechanism which accounts for the forward scatter property of the VLF events observed in our data.