Weather tracking satellites are providing life saving information and recording what is happening with our global climate.
2024 was Europe’s hottest year ever recorded.
“Unprecedented average land and ocean temperatures in Europe were accompanied by a near-record number of heat stress days, where weather conditions pose substantial risks to human health and a record number of frost-free days. These findings – set against an alarming, continued rise in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane – are detailed in the European State of the Climate (ESOTC) report, an annual assessment published by the European Union and the World Meteorological Organization.”
The ESOTC report draws on contributions from more than a hundred scientists and organisations – and includes extensive satellite data from EUMETSAT’s programmes. It provides a wide-ranging analysis of Earth system variables, extreme events and their impacts, along with reflections on climate policy and action.
Dr Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service explained:
“It’s estimated that at least 335 lives were lost in Europe last year due to storms and flooding, with over 400,000 people affected, and a further 42,000 impacted by wildfires.
“These extreme events led to an estimated €18 billion of damages – 85% of which was attributed to flooding.
“We know from the physics of the Earth system that the sooner we reach net zero and stop emitting new sources of greenhouse gases, the sooner our climate will stabilise. What we don’t know is when that stabilisation will occur, we don’t know whether any tipping points in the climate system will have occurred before we stabilise the climate, and we don’t know the implications for extreme events once we have a more stable climate.
“What we do know – and what has been consistently clear in all of the IPCC reports – is that as long as emissions continue to rise, extreme events will become more frequent and more intense.”
Lightning Mega Flashes
Researchers at Arizona State University have been using weather tracking satellites to measure the extremes of lighting occurring in the US where 20 to 30 people are killed each year in the U.S. and hundreds more injured in lightning strikes.
Randy Cerveny, Arizona State University President’s Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, and his team used space-based instruments to measure a megaflash, which took place during a major thunderstorm in October 2017.
The single lightning flash streaked across the Great Plains for 515 miles, from eastern Texas nearly all the way to Kansas City.
Randy Cerveny, who serves as rapporteur of weather and climate extremes for the World Meteorological Organization, the weather agency of the United Nations said:
“It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as additional high-quality lightning measurements accumulate over time.”
Satellite-borne lightning detectors in orbit since 2017 have made it possible to continuously detect lightning and measure it accurately at continental-scale distances.
Parked in geostationary orbit, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s GOES-16 satellite detects around one million lightning flashes per day. It is the first of four NOAA satellites equipped with geostationary lightning mappers, joined by similar satellites launched by Europe and China.
Michael Peterson at the Georgia Tech Research Institute., said:
“We are now at a point where most of the global megaflash hotspots are covered by a geostationary satellite, and data processing techniques have improved to properly represent flashes in the vast quantity of observational data at all scales.”
Most lightning flashes are limited to less than 10 miles in reach. When a lightning bolt reaches beyond 60 miles (100 kilometers to be exact), it’s considered a megaflash. Less than 1 percent of thunderstorms produce megaflash lightning, according to satellite observations analyzed by Peterson. They arise from storms that are long-lived, typically brewing for 14 hours or more, and massive in size, covering an area comparable in square miles to the state of New Jersey. The average megaflash shoots off five to seven ground-striking branches from its horizontal path across the sky.
While megaflashes that extend hundreds of miles are rare, it’s not at all unusual for lightning to strike 10 or 15 miles from its storm-cloud origin. And that adds to the danger. Cerveny said people don’t realize how far lightning can reach from its parent thunderstorm.
Click on this link to access, A New WMO-Certified Single Megaflash Lightning Record Distance: 829 km (515 mi) occurring on 22 October 2017, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Fiona Grahame
