Midwest Snow Storm Showing Snow On Ground From Satellite Loop

Snow and Ice As Seen From Space -

This past weeks Midwest snow and ice storm not only left it’s marks on regional airports and highways, but also from above looking down with high resolution visible satellite imagery. Visible satellite loops can pick out all kinds of interesting features not only with clouds at different layers of the atmosphere, but also featured at ground level. As you can see in the following visible satellite loop, large portions of the central and northern Plains states are covered in heavy snow. This stands out as the “white” not moving while the rest is mid and upper-level clouds streaming across the United States. The snow reflects sunlight and shows up a stationary in the background, while the rest is clouds in motion above the ground. You can clearly see a large swath of snow from the Plains east-northeastward into the Great Lakes and Northeast. Now that the storm system is pulling away and taking all the clouds with it, it opens the view to all the snow and ice on the ground left behind by the storm.

What Else Can We Find In This Satellite Loop?

You can also see the eastern outline edge of the Rockies Mountains running south to north through eastern New Mexico and Colorado. The stationary “white snow” marks the Rocky Mountains at much higher elevations. Visible satellite imagery can be a lot of fun to search and find new features each day. Not only is it helpful in forecasting the weather, finding mesoscale boundaries and convergence, but also pinpointing wildfires, floods, hurricane movement and interesting cloud formations. I use visible imagery each day for personal forecasting and just to kill time trying to pick out new and interesting features in the fluid atmosphere.