The below video illustrates how the development of a large thunderstorm looks like from space. The thunderstorm in question formed over Turin in northern Italy on Sunday (19 August 2012).
'Natural Colour' RGB images are taken from EUMETSAT's Meteosat-9 satellite in geostationary orbit 36,000 km above the Earth.
The Natural Colour RGB makes use of three solar channels: VIS0.6, VIS0.8 and NIR1.6. In this colour scheme vegetation appears greenish because of its large reflectance in the VIS0.8 channel (the green beam) compared to the NIR1.6 (red beam) and VIS0.6 (blue beam) channels.
Water clouds with small droplets have large reflectance at all three channels and hence appear whitish, while snow and ice clouds appears cyan because ice strongly absorbs in NIR1.6 (no red).
Bare ground appears brown because of the larger reflectance in the NIR1.6 than at VIS0.6, and the ocean appears black because of the low reflectance in all three channels.
See the full view of the Earth, as seen by Meteosat 9, hereor below: http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/IPPS/html/MSG/RGB/NATURALCOLOR/index.htm
