Thunderstorms from 40,000 feet

5:36pm CDT; July 13, 2006

While flying from Kansas City to Las Vegas (via Denver) on July 13th, we were fortunate enough to observe a couple of beautiful thunderstorms from about 40,000 feet. Having the window seat on the right side of the west-bound plane afforded me a beautiful view of a string of storms lined up along an E-W boundary drapped over northern Kansas and southern Nebraska:

Low resolution archived radar image from NCDC.
If you know where I can find a better quality image from July 13-14th, email me

Frontier Airlines even offers in-flight tracking from every seat: The small LCD screens offer up several channels of cable TV programming as well as a real-time graphical representation of the plane’s location, speed, and altitude:

Below are a couple more shots of the same cell in NE Kansas taken several minutes apart between 5:36 and 5:44pm CDT: