Not having full command of the German language, “sehr schweres Unwetter” seems like an understatement. It translates as “very bad thunderstorm,” which in this case is like calling the Titanic a “very big boat”. Of course, if you live in the Great Plains, you probably refer to a supercell thunderstorm as “a little bit of rain and wind” but the storms that hit Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) on 9-10 June 2014 rival anything the toughest Oklahoman has experienced (minus the tornadoes). Also, keep in mind that Germany and the Low Countries have nowhere near the wide-open spaces the U.S. Great Plains are known for. Take 5 times the population of Oklahoma and cram them into a land area the size of Maryland. (Or, if you’re from Maryland, multiply your state’s population by three to approximate the population density of the area we’re talking about. Then ponder how anyone in that part of Germany is able to spend less than 18 hours per day stuck in traffic like you would be if you were suddenly surrounded by three times as many people.)

Let me set the scene for you. (If you’ve ever lived in the Midwest, you know the drill.) The air is hot and unbelievably humid. The sky is overcast. There is no wind to speak of, but there is a certain “electricity” in the air that tells you that a violent end to the heatwave is coming. Off in the distance, clouds lower and darken. A gentle rumbling of thunder slowly builds as the storm approaches. Lightning appears and becomes ever more frequent. Right before the storm hits, the winds pick up out of nowhere and… Wait! I don’t need to describe it. I can show it to you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFbsubhW5s0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sLfWkqoIq8

EDIT: I did need to describe it, because the videos are no longer available. If you weren’t able to see the videos before they were removed, they showed scary looking clouds and nearly constant lightning approaching Bochum. In fact, there were an estimated 113,000 lightning strikes across Germany from the storm.

Germany is, apparently, a land of iPhones and GoPros and all sorts of video recording equipment, and there is no shortage of video of the storm. There are videos of the storm approaching from different perspectives (here, here and here), the strong winds and heavy rains that are more reminiscent of a tropical storm (here, here and here), footage of the lightning in slow-motion and, because this is the Internet, a 30 min. montage of storm footage set to salsa music (although one commenter says the first footage is from a storm in 2010).

The aftermath is pretty impressive also – trees and large branches down everywhere blocking roads, crushing cars and stopping the never-late German train system. In fact, 6 people were killed – mostly by falling trees. Winds were observed in the 140-150 km h^-1 range (approximately 85-90 miles per hour), which puts it just below a Category 2 hurricane according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. There were even reports of baseball sized hail, something that’s not unusual in Oklahoma, but is very rare in Europe. (Here is some pretty big hail in the town of Zülpich from earlier in the day.)

Now that you’ve used up the last 90 minutes looking at YouTube videos, let’s get down to business. What do satellites tell us about this storm?

EUMETSAT put together this animation of images from the geostationary satellite Meteosat-10:

Watch that video again, preferably in fullscreen mode. First, the white boxes highlight the supercell thunderstorms over Europe between 01:00 UTC 9 June 2014 and 08:15 UTC 10 June 2014. Right before sunset on 9 June, you can see a storm moving north out of France into Belgium that seems to explode as it heads towards the Netherlands and western Germany. This is our “schweres Unwetter”. The second thing to notice is where that storm is at 02:00 UTC on the 10th. That was the time that VIIRS passed overhead.

So, without any more bloviating, here’s the high-resolution infrared (I-5) image from VIIRS:

VIIRS I-5 image of severe thunderstorms over Europe from 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014

The storm that caused all the damage over Nordrhein-Westfalen has weakened and is now over northeastern Germany on its way to Poland. But, a second impressive supercell complex is pounding Belgium and the Netherlands, and taking aim at western Germany once again.

The coldest pixels are 196.5 K (-76.7 °C or -106 °F) in the storm over Benelux and 198.7 K (-74.5 °C or -102.1 °F) in the storm over northeast Germany. Another impressive thing about these storms is their size relative to the size of these countries. That Benelux storm looks like it’s at least five times the size of Luxembourg and as big as Belgium! (And I’m not counting the area of the anvil, which is even larger. I’m only counting the area containing overshooting tops.)

Since it’s nighttime, what did the Day/Night Band see? Well, the answer depends on how you display the data. You see, we’re approaching the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, where the days are long and twilight encroaches the nighttime overpasses at these latitudes. If you try to scale the radiances from lowest = black to highest = white, you get something like this:

VIIRS Day/Night Band image, taken 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014. Radiance values are displayed and scaled according to text above.

That’s not very helpful because the radiance values vary by 6 orders of magnitude across the scene and we only have 256 colors to work with to relay that information. But, we can take advantage of the fact that the Day/Night Band radiance values are, to the first order, a function of the solar and lunar zenith angles, and use this as the basis for a “dynamic scaling” that compares the observed radiance with an expected maximum and minimum radiance value that is a function of those angles. (In case you’re interested, the dynamic scaling algorithm used here is based around the error function.) This allows you to produce something like this:

VIIRS Day/Night Band image, taken 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014. This image uses dynamic scaling as described in the text.

Here, we’ve lost some quantitative information (colors no longer represent specific radiance values) but we’ve gained valuable qualitative information.  Now we can see where the storms are! Notice the shadows in the overshooting tops of our Benelux storm – right where the coldest pixels are in the infrared image. We can see some of the city lights, but not others, because the twilight encroaching from the northeast is brighter than the cities in that part of the image. (It is easy to pick out London and Paris, though.) If you read the previous post, you might be wondering why there are no mesospheric waves with these storms. That’s because there is too much twilight (and moonlight) to see the airglow. (There’s also the possibility that the stratosphere and mesosphere weren’t conducive for vertically propagating waves, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that under these lighting conditions.)

Some people like to combine the infrared with the Day/Night Band into a single image. This is done by changing the opacity of one of the images and overlaying it on the other. Here’s an example of what that looks like using the dynamically scaled Day/Night Band image:

VIIRS combined IR/DNB image from 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014

The light/shadow effect of the visible information adds a sort-of 3-D effect to the infrared images and, since this is the Day/Night Band, it can show where the storms are in relation to the urban areas. Here, it seems to work better for the Benelux storm than it does for the other one. (Of course, it would be better without the twilight. And, it works best with a full moon, which occurred three days later.)

Of course, if you have access to the Near Constant Contrast imagery, you don’t have to worry about scaling. The imagery is useful as-is:

VIIRS NCC image, taken at 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014

And the combined IR/NCC image looks like this:

Combined IR/NCC image from 02:07 UTC 10 June 2014

In case you’re interested, there are additional videos, animations and images of these storms from the Meteosat High Resolution Visible (HRV) channel at the EUMETSAT Image Library.