The radar you see on flightaware is the current radar image. In other words, it will not show the radar that was present when the flight took place. There is no way to tell on flightaware what weather any given flight flew through.

Anyone know what kind of damage the plane suffered?

Actually they have updated it and it shows the radar image as the flight was in the air. As you can see in this flight from four days ago it just shows the precip over south Lake Michigan. FlightAware > Live Flight Tracker > Pinnacle Airlines, Inc. D/B/A Northwest Airlink #2921

You are incorrect. Look at past flights..........

Why didn't the pilots push the turbulance button?
It's right in front of them.

Yea flightaware is pretty neat in that it does show you what weather was present for a particular flight in the past. You can lookup past flights for i think 3 months if you sign-up (free) - and it will show you the actual weather/groundtrack for all of them.

I've checked out some of my own flights after the fact, and found that it gives a pretty accurate depiction of what type of weather a flight experienced.

If the radar image was the weather at the time of the flight, west looked nice to begin with. Time to write off that IPhone as a work expense.

i wondered about the flightaware weather depiction. obviously it can't show current weather at each moment of flight. it has to take a single picture at a single moment in time, right? so then i think the weather picture is either at the departure time or arrival time, most likely the arrival time. we can't know exactly what the crew was looking at.

anyway, i'm sure the crew made the right moves

The radar picture on Flightaware definitely takes a shot of the current weather at the time of flight. Just like someone said it probably takes the shot at the beginning or end of the flight. Maybe somewhere in between but it definitely taken during the flight.
I would love to see pics of the RJ that took the damage. It looks like they went thru that nasty red at some point.