Winter's White Carpet Slowly Creeping South

After an invigorating brisk walk with my lovely wife this crisp, clear, and calm glorious autumn morning with Orion staring down at us, I decided to come back and see if any of the preliminary maps from the "freak" October snowstorm were posted yet from the NESIS (northeast snowfall impact scale) website.  Sure enough on this beautiful sunny Saturday morning, just one week following the onset of our anomalous October snow, the map was posted.  I thought I would share this with y'all who might be interested.

And, as many of you know, I got lost with the websites and their embedded links that are available which remotely sense our planet.  Here is the latest snow and ice cover slowly creeping south from the north polar region as the sun continues to lower its diurnal sun angle until the winter solstice.  First, a north polar view of the snow and ice cover.

And now the close-ups...1st of the USA...

NW O Canada and Alaska...

Lastly, northern Eurasia...

Now when I looked at these graphics, I thought to myself that this seemed to be a rather widespread area of snow and ice for this early in the cold weather season.  So I researched snow cover anomaly online and found this...from the Rutgers Global Snow Center and the Florida State Univ locally produced web pages.  It now appears that we are essentially "normal" in snow cover as the blue (observed) fits closely with the green (climatologically normal); maybe a bit more expansive in Asia and less so in North America.

Here is a graphical representation from the last 4 months...

You can clearly see a few cold shots in mid September and then again around the 1st of October increased the white carpet and most recently with the widespread October snow event as shown above with the 1st map!  Most of October was lacking in snow cover when compared to normal.  So what does all of this really mean?  Who knows???  One thing for sure...it will most certainly be blamed on Global Warming!

Enjoy your Breeders' Cup & NCAA College football Saturday!

Smitty

AA:  Just some data that scrutinizes snow and ice since we are getting closer to winter!