Snowpocalypse 2011

It was a late developing storm in Grand Ledge, but aren't they always, though? Predicted storms never seem to be as big, or arrive as timely as anticipated, either. I went outside to secure a garage window and bring a shovel inside Tuesday night around 11 P.M., there was probably 2 inches already, but it was tough to be certain with all the blowing. Winds were 31 mph, 4 below the blizzard threshold, and school was already cancelled.

Woke to drifts, and blowing cold. Played and worked and came home with Sophia to Tiffani and Seamus having already dug fortifications, so I tried to film the snowball attacks with the phone. Pardon the change in orientation, I mistakenly figured the phone would follow along. School is cancelled again for Thursday.

Abandoned vehicles litter northbound Lake Shore Drive, Chicago on Wednesday, February 2
 morning.

This is what the snowstorm blanketing much of the country looked like. The storm, which was covering a third of the U.S., is captured in the following images by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA's Terra satellite as well as the GOES-13 satellite. From NASA:

Visible and infrared images and animations of the storm's clouds and movement are created every 15 minutes by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. using data from GOES-11 and GOES-13, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. The GOES-13 and GOES-11 satellites that cover the eastern and western U.S., respectively, are operated by NOAA.

The photos give a more complete picture of just how much of the country was covered by clouds (much of which included snow), in stunning detail. The storm even seemed to stretch coast-to-coast.