1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) images (above) showed signatures of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket booster following the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch from Kennedy Space Center at 1126 UTC on 30 August 2026.

1 minute after launch, at 1127 UTC, a multi-panel display of imagery from all 16 ABI spectral bands on GOES-19 (below) revealed either a reflective signature (in Visible band 02) or a thermal signature (in Near-Infrared bands 03-06, and Infrared bands 07-16) as the Falcon Heavy rocket was ascending just off the Florida coast.

1 minute later, at 1128 UTC, a thermal signature of the rocket booster was apparent in Near-Infrared bands 04-06 and Infrared bands 07-16 (below). In the 3 Water Vapor spectral bands (08/09/10), a short trail of moisture-laden rocket exhaust was seen immediately behind the leading hot thermal signature of the booster engines.

A common practice with Falcon Heavy rockets is to have the 2 side core boosters perform a series of “boostback burns” to slow their descent in order to make a landing on a floating water platform (or in this case, back to Kennedy Space Center), to enable their recycling for future flights. A signature of dual side core boostback burns appeared at 1133 UTC in imagery from several of the Near-Infrared and Infrared spectral bands (below).

Many of the aforementioned signatures were seen in a larger-scale view of 1-minute GOES-19 Rocket Plume RGB images, created using Geo2Grid (below), including: (1) the hot thermal signature at launch appeared as a cluster of brighter red pixels at 1126 UTC; (2) at 1129 UTC a long trail of the rocket exhaust moisture plume (brighter shades of yellow-green) was very apparent, with the first of 3 side core boostback burn signatures appearing in the middle of the plume, and the center core thermal signature appearing at the leading edge of the plume; (3) the brighter yellow-green final side core boostback burn signature appeared at 1132 UTC, After the Falcon Heavy departed from the satellite scene, note how the western portion of the rocket’s trailing moisture plume (pale shades of yellow) was advected slowly northward, while the eastern portion of the moisture plume (which was at a higher altitude) was advected more rapidly southward — an effect of wind shear with height.

A stepped sequence of imagery from all 16 ABI spectral bands is shown below.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) True Color RGB images from the CSPP GeoSphere site (above) provided a view of the rocket condensation cloud resulting from the launch of EUMETSAT MTG-I2 (Meteosat Third Generation Imager-2) from Europe’s Spaceport (the Guiana Space Centre) near Kourou, French Guiana at 2011 UTC on 27 August 2026. The rocket condensation cloud’s deformation in time was due to changes in wind direction and/or wind speed with height.

An animation of 1-minute GOES-19 Rocket Plume RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below) showed the high-altitude signature of the Ariane 6 rocket’s exhaust trail of hot water vapor (brighter shades of yellow).

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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.

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Episode 54 of the ongoing eruption of Kilauea (Episode 1 began on 23 December 2024) commenced at 2030 UTC on 25 August 2026. 5-minute PACUS Sector GOES-18 (GOES-West) Shortwave Infrared images (above) showed the distinct hot thermal signature of lava fountaining from the Halema`uma`u crater, which persisted for about 9 hours.

As early as 2006 UTC on 25 August, the thermal signature exhibited a 3.9 µm brightness temperature of 137.88ºC (below) — which is the saturation temperature of GOES-18 ABI Band 7 detectors. This saturation temperature was intermittently seen until the eruption episode ended at 0533 UTC on 26 August.

GOES-18 Ash RGB and SO₂ RGB images (below) displayed a prominent plume of SO₂ from the Kilauea eruption, which drifted southward. The SO₂ plumes appear similar in these two RGBs, since the 8.5 µm spectral band (which is sensitive to SO₂ absorption) is used in the Green component of each RGB.

The National Weather Service issued a Special Weather Statement advising of potential ashfall downwind of Kilauea. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory estimated that the volcanic plume reached an altitude of 17000 feet — which, according to rawinsonde data from Hilo (below) was near the maximum altitude of northerly winds that were advecting the SO₂ plume southward.

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