13 April 2015
Spring Marches North: The View from Space
Posted by Dan Satterfield
This is from the NASA Aqua satellite. You can see the green of spring moving into Virginia, while snow remains in the Adirondacks. High resolution, color imagery from polar orbiting satellites allows folks like me to better tell the story of our planet to our TV audience and to our online viewers as well.
Great picture! We’re still under snow and ice in that pic, although the last two days a lot has now melted. Our lake, which shows up in the pic too, is still fully ice-covered and you could probably walk (albeit unsafely) on it—the big danger is getting stuck in the slush layer between the recently frozen top and the solid winter ice below, and then you’ll have to crawl out on your belly to keep from exhausting yourself trying to pull your soggy wet legs high for each step.
We had a lot of rain 10 day so ago, then it all froze and we had more snow. I saw one truck stuck on the ice last weekend. They’d gone out thinking it was still solid ice, and had fallen through the crust about a km from shore. They revved their engine, but the truck didn’t even budge as the wheels were spinning on the wet slick solid ice below the surface crust.
Incidentally, at the beginning of winter and the big freeze, when someone asks when the ice is safe to drive on, the standard reply is, “About a week after the first truck has fallen through”. Nearly every year, the local paper has a story about the first truck through the ice, followed by the standard quip above, and then an exhortation for people not to go on the ice with vehicles. The fact that we have trucks going through so often doesn’t speak highly of the intelligence of a subsection of our town folks. 🙂