seeing inside clouds

[miriam_e]

Wow! How cool is this!

The new CloudSat satellite was launched at the end of April and is now peering into clouds to work out the fine detail of what are the processes operating inside them, giving us a better idea of what drives weather. It promises to revolutionise our understanding of what drives the atmosphere's engines. It has very simple, practical implications too because it can alert us to dangers by letting us see the guts of a storm instead of just its top surface.

CloudSat takes vertical slices through the atmosphere, seeing through all but the heaviest rain and can discriminate between different sized particles inside clouds. It could potentially be able to measure upward velocities too, though I don't know if they do that.

Click on the images above for the CloudSat home page where this and more info is displayed.
You can get high resolution images of this particular structure at here