Snowy U.S. Panorama by Satellite

NASA has released images of North America covered by the massive winter storm that last week hit 30 states.

Snowfall across 30 U.S. States last week followed by the aftermath of the Groundhog Day blizzard shows snow from the Great Plains to New England under the cold and clear skies that followed. The storms made for a nice snowy satellite-view panorama

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) that cover the U.S. weather, GOES-11 and GOES-13 are operated by NOAA, and the NASA GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. creates images and animations from those satellite data.

Dennis Chesters, a NASA GOES Project scientist at Goddard provided some guidance in looking at satellite images to find snow on the ground. “Wooded regions like the Appalachians and Midwest river valleys can remain dark even with a foot of snow on the ground,” Chesters said. “Metropolitan areas like Chicago are dark due to urban development like cleared highways and parking lots.”

This MODIS image from the Terra satellite was captured on Feb 5 at 17:30 UTC (12:30 p.m. EST) and shows snowfall on the ground in northeast Texas (lower left), Oklahoma (above Texas), Arkansas (east of Oklahoma), and the northwestern tip of Louisiana (lower right).

Source: NASA

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