Lightning from Space: Reid Wiseman’s ISS Video of a Houston Storm

In 2014, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman looked down from the International Space Station and filmed a thunderstorm over the Houston area. His short Vine clip showed lightning flickering through the cloud tops like pulses of white light, a view of a storm that almost nobody on the ground ever sees.

Reid Wiseman’s lightning video over Houston

Wiseman was a flight engineer on ISS Expeditions 40 and 41. He launched on 28 May 2014 and returned to Earth on 10 November 2014, after 174 days in space and two spacewalks. He shared photographs and videos on Twitter throughout the mission, and his lightning Vine was picked up by NBC News, CBS News and Business Insider.

As NBC News described it, lightning seen from the ground snaps downward, but from orbit it seems to spread around the cloud in slow motion, with faster flashes flickering in one corner of the frame. Houston has a particular link to the crew: it is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Mission Control. In October 2014 Wiseman posted three more Vines of a lightning storm over Kansas, where flashes and pools of light lit up the clouds.

Why lightning looks different from space

From the ground we mostly notice cloud-to-ground strikes, bright channels that link the sky to the earth. Yet those make up only about a quarter of all lightning. Most flashes stay inside the clouds or jump between them. Seen from above, these intra-cloud discharges light the storm from within, so the cloud tops glow in patches that appear and fade across the storm.

Without buildings, trees or horizon for scale, the eye reads the storm as one large structure. A single thunderstorm system can cover a whole region, and from orbit an astronaut sees flash after flash rippling across it within seconds.

Lightning facts and figures

• Lightning strikes about 44 times every second worldwide, nearly 1.4 billion flashes a year.
• The air around a flash heats to roughly 30,000 °C, several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
• The world’s lightning capital is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where the Catatumbo lightning produces about 250 bolts a day on around 297 days a year.
• Above some storms, positive lightning can trigger sprites, brief red flashes tens of kilometres above the ground.

Satellites that watch lightning from orbit

Astronaut videos are only one way to see lightning from above. Since the 1990s, dedicated instruments have mapped flashes from space. The Optical Transient Detector flew from 1995, and the Lightning Imaging Sensor on the TRMM satellite from 1997. A second Lightning Imaging Sensor worked on the ISS for about three years from 2017. Today the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on NOAA’s GOES-R satellites and Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager track storms continuously, helping forecasters spot storms that are rapidly intensifying.

For more lightning seen from very different viewpoints, compare Craig Shimala’s Chicago storm recording, where the skyline gives the bolts a human scale, with Vincent Brady’s panoramic night-sky work.

From the ISS to Artemis II

Wiseman, born in Baltimore in 1975, is a U.S. Navy captain and former test pilot who joined NASA in 2009. He served as Chief of the Astronaut Office from 2020 to 2022 and was named commander of Artemis II in April 2023. The crew launched on 1 April 2026 and travelled farther from Earth than any humans before them, beating the record set by Apollo 13.

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