Remember that your radar can't paint the tops of the clouds; when you look to see what's there, you're not seeing what's there.
Thanks for reminding me of something I read in my company FM. There is a way to estimate the tops of a storm painted on the radar screen. Granted this is to determine the relative severity of the storm in question, not to be used to attempt an overflight in IMC.
First you must find the radar top. Start by scanning the parallel beam position. Once you get a good echo, continue to increase the tilt until the echo disappears. Note the tilt. Now we can find the actual radar top. The formula is simple and is as follows:
distance to echo x 100 x degrees of tilt change from parallel beam = radar top
So for example we have an echo 40 miles out. We increase the tilt until the echo falls off the screen and we needed 4 degrees of tilt to do so.
40 x 100 x 4 = 16,000. Therefore the
radar top is 16,000 feet above the current flight level. To find an approximate
actual top we multiply the 16,000 in this example by 120% and the actual top comes out to 19,200 ft above the current flight level.
Remember the actual top is always 120% of the radar top that we found using the said formula.
Hope someone else found this little tid bit as interesting as I did. It's good to know!