Almost every photo of a hurricane is from above. Which gives us a good idea of its diameter but leaves us with no impression of its height. Fortunately there is a new satellite in orbit called CloudSat. CloudSat is remarkable because it uses radar to penetrate into clouds and provide a cut-away view of what a hurricane might look like edge-on.

Take a look at the photo below. The top portion is the view of a category 4 Typhoon Choi-Wen. The red line marks the slice that CloudSat took as its orbit passed directly over and through the eye. The bottom image is the cut away view that CloudSat is able to produce from the data it gathers. Here I’ve done my own editing by placing a triangle that represents the height of Mt. Everest. You can see that Choi-Wen is nearly double the height of the highest peak on Earth. And the record cloud height that I could find, for hurricane Wilma, was 59,000 feet.

You can now see that hurricanes are not just impressive in their diameter but also in how emmensely high they are.

polyGeek hurricane, Meteorology