A powerful blizzard buried the U.S. Midwest in snow on the weekend after Thanksgiving, disrupting transportation networks on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. Thousands of flights were canceled, and hundreds of thousands of people lost power in the wake of whiteout conditions that dropped more than 1 foot (0.3 meters) of snow in many areas.
On November 27, 2018, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this false-color image of a band of snow stretching across several Midwestern states. The image was made from a combination of infrared and visible light (MODIS bands 7-2-1) in order to better differentiate between snow and ice (teal) and clouds (white).
References & Resources
- National Weather Service (2018, November 28) Storm Summary Message. Accessed November 28, 2018.
- The Washington Post (2018, November 26) Blizzard cuts power to hundreds of thousands and halts travel in the Midwest. Accessed November 28, 2018.
- USA Today (2018, November 26) Travel chaos: Blizzard-like conditions in Midwest ground thousands of flights, snarl roads. Accessed November 28, 2018.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Adam Voiland, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Caption by Adam Voiland.
