After driving over 300 miles, waiting for eight hours and a half-night sleeping in the car, Serge finally captured this forecasted thunderstorm on a full-moon night over the famous Bay of Cannes in the south of France.

"This thunderstorm unleashed several thunderbolts in the clear sky under the stars. There was no rain, no parasite clouds, just the calm of the night and the sound of thunder - ideal conditions!"

Lightning is a large electrical spark produced by electrons moving quickly from one place to another to neutralise two charged regions – this can be within the cloud or between the cloud and ground. It is the collision of small ice crystals with larger and denser graupel (soft hail) within a thunderstorm that transfers electrons from one to the other. The storm updraught then carries the positively charged ice crystals to the top of the cloud whilst the negatively charged graupel falls towards the bottom. Once the opposite charges build up enough, the insulating property of the air breaks down to form lightning. The air surrounding the lightning channel briefly reaches temperatures of up to 30,000°C, causing the air to rapidly expand, which we then hear as thunder.

Phoenix captured this image of an approaching supercell in Kansas, USA. A supercell is a thunderstorm with a deep rotating updraught, called a mesocyclone. They are powerful storms that can produce some of the most severe weather, including tornadoes, large hail, damaging wind gusts and torrential rain.

Over the Great Plains of the central USA, supercell thunderstorms frequently develop during a well-defined storm season that runs approximately from April to June, peaking in May.

Just below the blue-green colouration in the storm, you can see a shelf cloud. Also known as an 'Arcus' cloud, it can be easily identified by its menacing, wedge-shaped formation as a rain-cooled airs flows out of a thunderstorm. Despite their appearance, they are relatively harmless. It's better to consider them as an indicator of potentially imminent severe weather.

Fynn took this image in Frenchs Forest, New South Wales, Australia, just after a thunderstorm.

Severe thunderstorms are the most common and most damaging type of storm in New South Wales. Australia classifies a thunderstorm as 'severe' if it produces any of the following: hail measuring more than 2cm in diameter, wind gusts above 90 km/h, tornadoes, or heavy rain that leads to flash flooding.

Severe thunderstorms can happen all year round in New South Wales. However, they are most common from October to March, often referred to as the 'severe thunderstorm season'.

Christopher took this image of the Qasr Al Hosn, one of the oldest landmarks in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in December 2020 when the temperature dropped.

He was on his way home after dropping his wife at work when he saw the fog forming. Immediately, he took out the only camera he had – his mobile phone – and captured this beautiful shot.

Fog is the term used to describe the suspension of water droplets in the surface layer of the atmosphere, which reduces horizontal visibility to less than 1km. Around 95% of the fog observed in the UAE is radiation fog and is most common in the winter. This type of fog forms over land when radiational cooling reduces the temperature of the near-surface air to below its dew point. The other 5% in the UAE is advection fog, forming when warm, moist, and stable air moves over a cooler surface.

Christopher is thankful for the opportunity the weather gave him to capture this beautiful image. It will stay as a memory forever.

On a typical May evening on the east coast of Ireland, Susan headed out to her cockapoo Evie's favourite playground, the South Beach, Greystones.

The minute she stepped onto the sand, the dark clouds gathered, and the heavens opened. Susan describes it as that beautiful warmish rain mixed with low evening sunshine.

As she meandered along, regretting just wearing a t-shirt, she was rewarded with this beautiful double rainbow, as well as a third bow, which was invisible to the camera. She took a couple of snaps on her phone to remember the stillness and emptiness of the beach with only the elements and weather for company.

Rainbows form due to the refraction (bending) and reflection of sunlight as it passes through raindrops. Clearly shown here, the colour banding in the secondary outer bow is in the opposite direction to the primary bow, which happens when the light is reflected twice off the back of the raindrops.