Satellite View of “Snowmageddon”


Did you live through what has been called “snowmageddon” or “snowpocalypse?” Here’s a satellite’s-eye view of the exceptionally severe winter storm in the Eastern US that dropped several feet of snow on Feb. 6 and 7. Reports of crashed and abandoned cars and hundreds of cancelled flights were interspersed with stories of massive snowball fights. The huge snowfall may hinder highway traffic into midweek, and hundreds of thousands lost electricity. The image comes from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Snow blankets the area hundreds of kilometers inland from the Atlantic coastline.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

10 Replies to “Satellite View of “Snowmageddon””

  1. I’m actually really jealous of people who get ALOT of snow. Here in Illinois it’s never enough to do anything too drastic. :/

  2. A shame really, within panic – no one’s pointing out this was the result of global warming. << btw, it should be renamed global contrast, 'warming' is so misleading.

  3. I think global warming is quite accurate phrase for the average warming of the globe as a whole. Local contrast as a result is of course to be expected.

  4. Strange, on an episode of the Simpsons last night, Lisa corrects Homer for the same misconception of GW.

  5. So far so good, the ignorance brigade has not saturated this with anti GW rubbish. As I understand it the polar circular gyrus or winds have weakened and cold arctic air mass has moved south. The result is the North Pole is much warmer, but North America and Eurasia are colder. Temperatures have just been redistributed some.


  6. Bright Side: the snow should reflect more sunlight back into space and thus help cool the atmosphere…at least a little.

  7. Keep it straight! “Snowpocalypse” was the pre-Christmas blizzard that hit the same area. We’ve gotten two of the top ten storms in DC-area history in the same season!

  8. @Dark Gnat: Not for long. I live in the northern/north-central Alleghenies (we got a little under two feet of snow here), and it’s already melting.

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