The Lightning Imager’s north camera faces Europe. The northernmost part of the field of view, that is, northern Scandinavia, never gets dark during the Northern Hemisphere summer.

Local thunderstorms develop on a daily basis in southern Europe around the Mediterranean during the warmer part of the year. These storms form as the Sun heats up the ground during the day and they dissipate relatively quickly after sunset. Some much larger and more persistent tropical storm systems can be seen in west Africa in the bottom left corner of the video.

The rest of Europe is mostly cloud-free as it was dominated by a large persistent high-pressure system when the data was collected. This animation was made using five days’ worth of data from the Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager’s north camera, from 00:00 UTC 2 June to 23:59 UTC 6 June 2023. It was made from raw preliminary data and is not for operational use.

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