ESA along with European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) have released the first animations from the Lightning Imager onboard the first Meteosat Third Generation satellite, which launched on 13 December 2022.

The Lightning Imager, built by Leonardo, can continuously detect rapid flashes of lighting in Earth’s atmosphere whether day or night from a distance of 36 000 km. The instrument has four cameras covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America. Each camera can capture up to 1000 images per second and will continuously observe lightning activity from space.

Each animation contains a sequence of images created by collecting one minute’s worth of lightning measurements, overlaid on a single image of Earth from the Lightning Imager.