Frigid Arctic air parked across the Prairies this week made the ground so cold that the planet’s surface looked like clouds to weather satellites.
Crystal clear skies across the centre of the country helped temperatures dip into the -30s to -40s on Friday morning—all part of a bitter chill that’ll sweep as far south as Florida in the coming days.
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Weather satellites carry an assortment of awesome instruments to help scientists keep track of our skies and even different features in outer space.
The instrument we use the most is called the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), which broadcasts back to Earth the satellite images we see on a daily basis.
One common product generated by the ABI is infrared imagery, which uses the temperature of the cloud tops to generate a satellite image.
Cloud tops can range in temperature from 10°C for the lowest, warmest clouds, all the way down to -90°C or colder for the very top of a raging cumulonimbus cloud that’s burst into the stratosphere.
Sometimes, though, extreme weather can throw a wrench in the data.
Temperatures across parts of the central Prairies dropped as low as the -40s on Friday morning. Conditions were so dangerously cold that we even saw light pillars appear in the skies over parts of Alberta, something we only see on these exceptional winter days.
The frigid air bathing the region made the ground exceptionally cold—so cold, in fact, that our satellite’s infrared sensors picked it up as though it were a cloud.
All the white and blue colours that showed up on the Prairies early Friday was actually the satellite ‘seeing’ the bitterly cold ground temperatures. The outline of the region’s terrain gradually faded through the day Friday as temperatures warmed with the morning sunshine.
We’re likely going to have similar satellite images appear over the weekend, as well.
Temperatures in southern portions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba are going to dip into the -30s, with some communities closing in on -40 degrees. It won’t be hard for infrared satellite imagery to highlight the terrain under these conditions.
It’s not uncommon for satellites to see the ground during extreme temperatures. The same phenomenon can happen on the other end of the spectrum during the heart of the summer. The desert floor often gets so hot on a summer afternoon that northern Mexico and the American Southwest look like dark voids on infrared satellite imagery.
