NASA's CloudSat satellite's Cloud Profiling Radar captured a sideways look across Ike on Sept. 2, at 16:15 UTC (2:15 p.m. EDT). For comparison, the top image is from the NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-12) around the same time.

The red line through the GOES satellite image shows the vertical cross section of radar, basically what Hanna's clouds looked like sideways. The colors indicate the intensity of the reflected radar energy. The top of Ike's clouds are over 8.7 miles high.

The blue areas along the top of the clouds indicate cloud ice, while the wavy blue lines on the bottom center of the image indicate intense rainfall. Notice that the solid line along the bottom of the panel, which is the ground, disappears in this area of intense precipitation. It is likely that in the area the precipitation rate exceeds 1.18 inches/hour, based on previous studies.