NASA Satellite Captures Stunning Snow Covered Midwest After Polar Vortex Blast

Satellites in low Earth orbit captured sweeping images that reveal the scale of the winter storm that painted much of the northern United States white.

The images, captured on January 6 by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reveal the spread of snow in the Midwest states. Enough to make Old Man Winter blush.

With all eyes on the wildfires in Southern California, it’s easy to forget that most of the country is still in the grip of a cold front that covered most of the Great Plains, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic in snow, ice and sleet. Although it’s worth noting that some of the white in the image above is actually a cloud; White spaces can be separated from each other in a false color version of the image.

The source of the snow – and the cold, although it is not clear from the visible light images – was the polar vortex which pushes cold Arctic air far south into the continental United States From Texas to the Mid-Atlantic, causing temperatures to drop between 5 degrees to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below average. Some parts of the snow-covered landscape have about 1.5 feet (0.46 meters) of snow, although this is not discernible from satellite images.

There are still more than two months of winter, and another cold may be around the corner. The National Weather Service Forecast Center published a short-range forecast bulletin early Wednesday that warned of “moderate to heavy lake-effect snow downwind from the Great Lakes,” a “developing winter storm” that will produce snow, sleet and freezing rain over the Southern Plains and the Lower Mississippi Valley. , as well as snow in the Rockies and the Upper Midwest.

That’s to say nothing of the “Extremely Critical Fire Weather Zone” on the southern coast of California, the bulletin also noted, which is powered by strong, fast Santa Ana winds from the north and northeast.

Significant weather events are easily seen from space because of the way they change the landscape – either turning into a winter wonderland or charring to pieces. But anyway, NASA’s satellites (and those of other agencies) will be there to study our way the environment has changedand how we react to that change.