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).

NASA Earth Observatory image by Adam Voiland, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Caption by Adam Voiland.