The lightning comes and goes in brilliant and terrifying flashes. With sufficiently powerful satellites in orbit, all the rumbling static in the world’s airspace is visible.
The latest visualization of atmospheric electricity is from Meteosat Third Generation, a European satellite launched in December. Its cameras can track and record lightning, even the smallest and fastest, day and night, over more than 80 percent of Earth’s surface. It is the first of six satellites that will eventually monitor weather around the world.
The European Space Agency released the first batch of imagery from the Meteosat orbiter last week, showing lightning strikes over regions of Western Europe, Africa and South America. The agency shared the image as it calibrated the satellite with its partners before it becomes fully operational at the end of this year.
The satellite’s Lightning Imager has four cameras, each with five lenses. The cameras can capture a lightning flash that lasts as little as 0.6 milliseconds, which is faster than the blink of an eye, and it can capture clear images at 1,000 images per second.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States has been monitoring lightning in North and South America since 2017, using the Geostationary Lightning Mapper aboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, known as GOES. The European system extends lightning detection to regions of Europe, Africa and the Middle East (with overlapping coverage in parts of South America), and provides significant technological improvements that will yield more data for weather forecaster in the world.
“First, we have better resolution,” said Guia Pastorini, a project engineering manager at Leonardo SpA, the aerospace company that developed the Meteosat imager. “We can detect at least one lightning bolt, while GOES can only detect a group of events. And in terms of energy, we may see weaker lightning strikes.”
Data from the imager will be useful in weather forecasting, said Carlo Simoncelli, a program manager at Leonardo. Lightning is associated with tornadoes, and there is a large increase in lightning that remains within the clouds about half an hour before a tornado. Being able to see that from space, Mr. Simoncelli said, “gives us the capacity for an early warning about potentially catastrophic events.”
That the system is always on and producing data in all conditions is a big advantage. “It’s pretty simple to recognize lightning at night in the desert,” Ms. Pastorini. “But if you look at lightning reflecting off the ocean or just the sun, it’s much more difficult.”
Steve Goodman, a recently retired senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who spent the last 10 years working on the GOES satellites’ Geostationary Lightning Mapper, noted that European systems are based on decades-old ideas. At some far northern latitudes, he said, the resolution of the cameras will not be better than that of American satellites. But he also said that the overall greater resolution of the European imager helped to see smaller and fainter lightning.
“They’ve built a very good system, and all their data will be shared,” he said.
Regardless of the system used, tracking lightning and its relationship to the intensity of storms and tornadoes has significant benefits for airline pilots, climate scientists and ordinary citizens, said Dr. Goodman.
“Emergency workers need to warn people,” he said, “not too early, because that costs money, and not too late, because it costs lives.”
