NASA-International Space Station

During the first two weeks of February 2010, the GOES-12 weather satellite practical a record-setting series of "Nor'easter" snow storms which blanketed the mid-Atlantic coast in two blizzards.



Washington, D.C. normally averages only 16 inches of snow per year, but this year the majority of the season's snowfall arrived over numerous days and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-12 captured the storms.

NASA's GOES Project produced a movie of GOES satellite data from February 1-16, 2010 when two blizzards hit the Baltimore, Md. and Washington areas. The GOES-12 operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) captures images of U.S. East Coast weather endlessly. Those imagery were compiled into a movie by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

"It is a enjoyment to see the fruits of the hard work and commitment from the NASA and NOAA team," said Andre Dress, GOES N-P NASA Deputy Project Manager, at NASA Goddard. "These imagery are very impressive and I am excited to think that these were taken with the older satellites. NOAA plans to put into examination the newer GOES N-P design, this April. I know we will be seeing superior and more exhilarating images this year," Dress said.


For the duration of the first two weeks of February, heavy, wet snows semi-paralyzed Washington. Five inches fell on February 3, 24 inches fell on February 6, and 12 inches on February 10. A second storm followed on February 16 that dumped 10 inches on Philadelphia and New York, but secure Washington and Baltimore.

These storms are called "Nor'easters" because the counter-clockwise circulation around a low strain system on the Atlantic coast pushes moist sea air from the north-east into arctic air over the land. This windy mixture creates a very capable snow-making machine from Boston to Washington. "The GOES movie illustrates how succeeding storms form along the Gulf coast, travel up the Atlantic coast, break over the mid-Atlantic states, and finally slide out to sea," said Dennis Chesters of the NASA GOES Project.

This movie was shaped by overlaying the clouds observed several times per hour by NOAA's GOES Imager onto a true-color map previously derived from NASA's MODIS land-mapping instrument. The infrared channels on GOES detect vapors day and night, which are portrayed as grey for low clouds and white for high clouds. During the day, the visible channel on GOES adds shadow-texture to the exhaust and illuminates the snow on the ground.

The movie compresses 16 days into 2 minutes. It illustrates how continental-scale land/sea/air phenomena come together to make big winter storms. NOAA's ground/space-based observing system and statistical weather models did an excellent job of accurately forecasting the location and depth of each East Coast blizzard in this series.