File:Snow in eastern Asia (MODIS 2015-02-13).jpg

English: Each year, for one month between early January and February, the city of Harbin, China celebrates winter with the largest snow and ice festival in the world. Known as the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, and includes swimming in frozen rivers, winter fishing, fashion shows, fireworks, alpine ski competitions, huge ice sculptures, and much more. The 2015 theme was �Ice Snow Harbin, Charming China Dream�.

In late January, a winter storm brought ice, snow and additional winter charm to the festival � and much of the rest of eastern Asia. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this true-color image of the freshly fallen show on January 31, 2015.

Snow extends from Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, and the frozen Sea of Okhotsk in the north, across the borders with Mongolia (west) and China (east). Even the Korean Peninsula, in the far south, is heavily dusted with snow, especially in the higher elevations. The city of Harbin sits south of center in this image, at the southeastern edge of the white, heavily snow-laden Songnen Plain. It also sits nearly due west of the straight borderline between far eastern Russia and China which runs northwest to southeast, and divides frozen Lake Khanka.

East of North Korea and southeast of Russia, clouds line up over the Sea of Japan in a formation known as cloud streets. Such regular, parallel rows of clouds can be formed when strong winds blow icy cold, dry air over relatively warmer water. The parallel rows line up along the path of the wind. In the far east of the image, a higher bank and less organized bank of cloud may well be part of the system that brought the snow to the region only the night before.