00:03What you're seeing here is lightning, captured by the UmitStat satellite.
00:08Its sole job is to float around our planet and image thunderstorms in real time,
00:12and this is the first video its operators have released.
00:15The video is actually an animation of many images stitched together,
00:18showing not only storms in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South America,
00:22but also providing weather data about those specific storms to the affected areas,
00:26with the focus being providing data to areas of Africa which lack good ground-based meteorological tools in some areas.
00:32Lightning occurs when static charges build up in rain clouds as high winds move water around within them.
00:37This causes electrons to be stripped away from that H2O,
00:40causing an electrical field to build which eventually breaks the insulation of the atmosphere inside the cloud before going boom.
00:46The animations from the new lightning tracking satellite are pretty incredible,
00:49and they reveal a different aspect with regards to the evolution of lightning storms.
00:53On the ground, what we see when lightning strikes is often a single bolt, followed by its thunder shortly after.
00:59However, from satellites designed to track lightning from space,
01:02the electric storms seem to reach and crawl across the affected area,
01:05looking more like a spreading fire when looking at them from a continental perspective.
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