Thunderstorms on IR Imagery

Thunderstorms have vertical depth. The adjacent animation illustrates this by showing a thunderstorm’s growth. Notice how its higher cloud tops become colder than lower-altitude clouds. On IR imagery, these cold cloud tops are easy to find because they generally correspond to the coldest colors on the color bar. This is important because taller clouds generally correlate to more active weather. Thus you can use infrared imagery of thunderstorms to infer storm strength. Test your skill at thunderstorm identification in the two questions that follow.