NOAA’s new GOES-16 satellite—the most advanced tool in the agency’s weather-prediction arsenal—doesn’t just take pretty pictures. It also might keep an unexpected bolt of lightning from crispifying you while you’re barbecuing this summer. Or give you ample warning before a tornado scoops you up inside your house, Dorothy style.

See, before GOES-16 was launched last year, scientists didn’t always have good way to check a storm’s intensity or lightning risk.

GOES-16 changes all that. Its lightning mapper is sensitive enough to see lightning brewing inside storm clouds over the Americas and their surrounding oceans.

Why is the lightning mapper so much better than your average storm chaser? It boils down to location and bandwidth. The lightning mapper (and the rest of GOES-16’s instruments) are in geostationary orbit over the the Americas, while previous lightning-detection instruments have been in low Earth orbit. “Now we’re just staring at the same place, so we can monitor the trends and life cycle of the lightning,” says Steve Goodman, GOES-16 senior scientist. “Before we just got snapshots.”

Now, monitoring intense storms is kind of the lightning mapper’s specialty, and measuring flash rates fills in a longstanding meteorological blindspot. Radar can detect precipitation, but it can’t tell you how intense a storm is.

No sensor can measure updraft strength, but NOAA has found a correlation between updraft and lightning activity.