Feature Identification » Identifying Surface Features » Snow

Although snow on the ground is uncommon in low elevation Africa, it can still be challenging to distinguish it from low clouds. You can do several things to differentiate snow on the ground from low clouds:

  • Animate the imagery, looking for how the features change over time. Snow cover often lasts for longer periods without much change in shape, while clouds (as seen by their shape, size, and texture) tend to change more rapidly.
  • Check the Natural Colour RGB in which snow cover and water clouds are different colours—snow is cyan while clouds are white.

In the visible imagery below, there is snow in Lesotho, but it is impossible to detect without further investigation. Compare the visible to the natural colour RGB to find it below.

left side product right side product

In mountainous regions, like the Atlas Mountains outlined in yellow, snow often has a dendritic (branched) pattern like that shown below. Clouds rarely look like this—only when they’re heavily influenced by topographic features.

EUMETSAT visible imagery over Africa, 1200 UTC 21 Dec 2016