The Lightning Imager on board Europe’s newest and most advanced meteorological satellite has been switched on and is delivering impressive first results.
Last Updated
01 November 2023
The instrument has four cameras covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America. The cameras will continuously observe lightning activity from space and EUMETSAT will disseminate the data to weather services in its member states and beyond. Crucially, EUMETSAT will deliver the data to weather services in Africa and other regions, where the capability to detect lightning with ground-based observations is limited.
Each animation is a sequence of images created by collecting one minute’s worth of lightning measurements, overlaid on a single image of the Earth from the Lightning Imager.
The animation below is a compilation created from two of the Lightning Imager’s cameras and shows a range of meteorological features.