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A snow storm arrived in the Deep South of the United States in mid-December 2008. Several inches of wet snow fell across parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on Thursday, December 11, closing schools and businesses in a part of the country where accumulating snow is a rare event.

The following day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite passed overhead and captured this natural-color image, revealing a broad swath of snow still on the ground from just north of New Orleans, Louisiana, to north of Jackson, Mississippi. Although snow did fall in New Orleans, it was no longer visible by the time MODIS captured this image. Flooding rains drenched other parts of the South, which may be why the Gulf of Mexico coast (lower right) and many rivers and lakes are brown with sediment.

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.

Instrument: 

Terra - MODIS