The first images from Europe's new weather satellite, Meteosat-12, have just been released.
The spacecraft, which sits 36,000km above the equator, was launched in December and is currently in a testing phase that will last most of this year.
When Meteosat-12's data is finally released to meteorological agencies, it's expected to bring about a step-change in forecasting skill.
Warnings of imminent, hazardous conditions should improve greatly.
This is something called "nowcasting" - the ability to say with greater confidence that violent winds, lightning, hail or heavy downpours are about to strike a particular area.
art of this advance will come from the increased resolution of Meteosat-12. For previous generation satellites, a feature in a storm had to be at least 1km across to be detected. The new spacecraft will track features as small as 500m in diameter.
"We can now see very fine structures," said Jochen Grandell from Eumetsat, the intergovernmental agency that manages Europe's weather satellites.
"You may have heard the term 'overshooting top', for example, which is a part of a thunderstorm's cloud development where you might see very strong updrafts and downdrafts. These are very rapidly changing, and they are very small as well. But they are also very powerful," he told BBC News.
