File:Western United States (MODIS 2019-03-22).jpg

English: A fierce late-winter storm struck the United States in mid-March 2019. After sweeping across California and the Pacific Northwest on March 11-12, two separate disturbances joined to create an intense, powerful storm that brought high winds, rain, and snow to a large swath of the country. As the storms reached the central Plains on March 12-13, the storm went through “bombogenesis”—a rapid intensification that brings a 24-millibar drop in atmospheric pressure in 24 hours or less. The power created by the “bomb cyclone” triggered intense blizzards and catastrophic flooding across several states before the storm dissipated by March 16. On March 15, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of the western United States, just a few days after being swept by the front-end of the devastating late-winter storm. While the effects on this region was relatively mild, fresh snow drapes all of the higher elevations in the region, from California (west) to Utah (east) and from Oregon and Idaho (north) to Arizona and New Mexico (south).