Rare Tornado Strikes France
In the late afternoon of 25 August 2026, a series of strong thunderstorms formed in the south of France. The most destructive part of this was a tornado that hit the village of Pomas, located approximately 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Toulouse. Dozens of people were hurt and hundreds of homes were destroyed, some dating back hundreds of years. Satellite imagery from the Meteosat-12 geostationary satellite captured the growth and development of these storms. Here’s a movie from the MTG Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) 0.64 visible wavelength channel as captured by EUMETSAT’s Eumetview site. The sun goes down toward the end of the clip, making it easy to see the overshooting tops of the most intense clouds at the end of the day.
The Day Convection RGB product is useful for helping to identify the cells as they’re developing. The yellow cells represent the locations of the most vigorous convection as deep plumes with small ice particles show up as yellow in this recipe. Note that this recipse depends heavily on shortwave channels, so it’s really only useful during the day. As the sun sets and night arrives, the clouds generally shift to a consistent magenta hue. This is not an indication of the makeup of the clouds, just that many of the input channels into the product are tending to zero as day turns to night.
Meteosat-12 also has a lightning imager. Here’s that same animation as the one above, this time with the lightning data overlaid on top of it. Watch how the developing storms are closely linked to the strong lightning levels.
So what caused such an unusual storm in this part of the world? Simply put: it was an American-style severe storm setup. Here in the United States, tornadoes form with the interaction of warm, moist Gulf air and colder air aloft, coupled with appropriate levels of wind shear to give the necessary rotation. In this case, weeks of hot temperatures have warmed the lower troposphere and significant northerly flow originating over the Mediterranean provided that Gulf-like moisture source. A westward propagating cold front was enough to initiate convection just as we see in the US Great Plains. Check out the radiosonde plot from Bordeaux in southwestern France courtesy of the University of Wyoming Sounding Archive. CAPE for this profile was over 2500 J/kg, meaning the environment was very conducive to supporting deep convection.
For more details on the storms, check out the news coverage from Reuters or the BBC. Or, if you”re feeling particularly adventurous, you can always read coverage in French at Le Monde.