About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
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Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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The UK and Ireland
This animation shows detections over northern Europe as far north as 58 degrees latitude in Scotland. During the morning and noon hours, small and short-lived isolated storms can be seen forming in the southeast and west areas of the UK and further north in Scotland.
In the afternoon, the storms in the south merge and form a larger oval mesoscale convective system that is moving north-westwards, then gradually weakening during the evening in intensity and the amount of lightning generated. Meanwhile, another smaller and less intense storm cluster can be seen in Scotland, moving east to west.
A lot of lightning activity is also visible to the south of the UK, over France and Spain. This animation, zooming in on the UK and Ireland in Europe, was made using around 13-hours’ worth of data from the Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager’s north camera, from 09:00 to 21:59 UTC 12 June 2023. It was made from raw preliminary data and is not for operational use.
