Snow covered land

Snow appears red-orange in the Snow RGB images.

The image below shows snow covered mainland north of the Black Sea and snow covered mountains south of the Black Sea. (The Sea of Azov is covered by ice).

Meteosat, SEVIRI Snow RGB for 02 February 2010 10:10 UTC

The image below shows Central Europe. Fog/low clouds formed several areas over the snow covered surface. The valley fog/stratus clouds are nicely seen in the Alps due to the good colour contrast between the red-orange snow and the white water clouds.

Meteosat, SEVIRI Snow RGB for 08 January 2009, 09:55 UTC

Note that the snow cover on the high mountains often depicts brighter colour than on the mainland or the hills, as the snow cover is less disrupted by vegetation.

Explanation of the colours for snow covered land (see the recipe):

• The reflectivity of snow is high in the 0.8, low in the 1.6 and very low in the 3.9 micrometer channels.
• After the linear stretching and image gamma correction the red signal is strong (still the highest one), the green signal is medium strong, while the blue signal is below medium. This signal composition results red-orange colours.