The images of this past week's heavy snowfall in Missouri and across the Midwest are familiar and chaotic - cars in ditches, closed airports and overall gridlock of infrastructure.
Today's NASA "Image of the Day" provides a decidedly more peaceful look at the storm's effects, from space.
Here's how NASA describes this image and the technology they used to capture it:
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime view at 1:55 a.m. CST on February 23. This imagery is from the VIIRS "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared. The day-night band takes advantage of moonlight, airglow, and starlight to brighten the landscape and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights and snow cover. On the night of this image, the Moon was nearly full. City lights glow like clusters of stars against a backdrop of grey and black in this image. The snow appears medium gray, and stretches from northern Texas to the Dakotas, and from the Rocky Mountain states eastward past Chicago. When VIIRS acquired this image, snow cover across multiple states had persisted since the previous night.
(H/T to The Wall Street Journal)
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