New Satellite Provides 'Breathtaking' Views Inside Storms

New images from a recently launched radar satellite show the promise of providing unprecedented views inside storms all around the globe. NASA's new CloudSat satellite reveals never-before-seen details of both the clouds and precipitation within a storm, from the Earth's surface to 19 miles high. "We're seeing the atmosphere as we've never seen it before," said Deborah Vane, CloudSat deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're no longer looking at clouds like images on a flat piece of paper, but instead we're peering into the clouds and seeing their layered complexity." The early images are test runs only, but already researchers are excited. http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060606_cloudsat_images.html