Nights of 1-2 and 2-3 August (and forecast)

The weekend proved not fruitful in catching sprites. Sunday night a good storm system was over Spain, but cloudiness obstructed observations. The same was true at the start of the shift of Fredrik and Oscar last Monday. A promising long-lived storm system moved from Spain into the Balearic islands, but both cameras were in/under the clouds. Last night we had not much to complain about: a clear view from both cameras, no software problems, however the very distant storms over Italy must have been too far to observe anything, not even the flashes were observed as their tops are below the horizon, as seen from France.

In the next two days, the upper low that is causing the thunderstorms is moving eastwards into the Balkan. A high pressure area settles over our region. At most some isolated thunderstorms could develop during the weekend over the Iberian Peninsula, but it does not seem that conditions will become favourable for sprites again till the weekend of the 13th of August, when ensemble model runs finally come again with a southwesterly flow over this part of Europe. Boring!