After a major winter storm swept across the country in late January, a prolonged surge of Arctic air tightened its grip on large areas of the U.S. pushing temperatures well below normal. From the Midwest to the South, the impacts of snow and ice became more extreme.
Even after the storm dispersed across the continent, the frigid chill remained. To understand the larger effects that winter storms like this one has, NASA used its Earth Observatory satellite observations, combined with temperatures calculated by the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) global model, to map out the temperatures from the polar vortex.
