Everyone knows what a hurricane is, but a lesser-known storm type – a medicane – recently made landfall in Libya. While the arrival of Medicane Jolina, a rare and unpredictable Mediterranean cyclone, brought extreme weather, it also provided scientists with a crucial test case. Using different types of data from Earth-observing satellites, researchers are gaining new insights into how these storms form and evolve, and therefore, how their impacts can be predicted more accurately.

Key to classifying the storm as a medicane were images and data from Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), among others. This video uses true colour images from 17 March 2026, for example, to show the spiralling cloud and eye-like of Medicane Jolina

Read full story: Getting to the core of a medicane