Unusual blizzard conditions turned some Hawaiian summits white with snow for Christmas day. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image on December 25, 2014, when snow capped the Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii.
White areas around the volcanoes are primarily clouds. One way to better distinguish snow from clouds is with false-color imagery. In the false-color view of the scene here, snow is red and clouds are white.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.
