{"id":68525,"date":"2026-01-17T22:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T22:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/?p=68525"},"modified":"2026-01-19T16:04:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T16:04:01","slug":"blowing-snow-creating-blizzard-conditions-in-eastern-north-dakota-and-western-minnesota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/archives\/68525","title":{"rendered":"Blowing snow creating blizzard conditions in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota"},"content":{"rendered":"

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5-minute GOES-19 Near-Infrared “Snow\/Ice” images, without plots of METAR surface reports, from 1501-1801 UTC on 17 January; Interstate highways are plotted in cyan [click to play MP4 animation]<\/p><\/div>Strong northerly winds created blowing snow and blizzard conditions across parts of eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota — particularly within the Red River Valley — on 17 January 2026<\/strong><\/a>. 5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East)<\/em>\u00a0Near-Infrared “Snow\/Ice” images (above)<\/em><\/strong> showed the development of Horizontal Convective Rolls (HCRs) where winds were channeled down the Red River Valley (topography<\/strong><\/a>) — with gusts in excess of 30 knots, reducing the surface visibility to less than 1 mile due to blowing snow at several METAR sites.<\/p>\n

GOES-19 Blowing Snow RGB<\/strong><\/a> images created using Geo2Grid<\/strong><\/a> (below)<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0provided a more distinct view of the HCRs.<\/p>\n

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5-minute GOES-19 Blowing Snow RGB images, from 1501-1901 UTC on 17 January [click to play animated GIF]<\/p><\/div>\n

===== 18 January Update =====<\/strong><\/p>\n

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5-minute GOES-19 Blowing Snow RGB images, from 1731-2146 UTC on 18 January [click to play animated GIF]<\/p><\/div>Even stronger winds in the wake of a cold frontal passage (with gusts in excess of 40 knots) produced a second day of blowing snow and blizzard conditions across eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota on 18 January — and HCRs were once again very prevalent in GOES-19 Blowing Snow RGB images (above)<\/strong><\/em>, across a larger area than the previous day. The surface visibility was reduced to near zero at some METAR sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Strong northerly winds created blowing snow and blizzard conditions across parts of eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota — particularly within the Red River Valley — on 17 January 2026. 5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East)\u00a0Near-Infrared “Snow\/Ice” images (above) showed the development of Horizontal Convective Rolls (HCRs) where winds were channeled down the Red River Valley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":68534,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,159,45,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geo2grid","category-goes-19","category-redgreenblue-rgb-images","category-winter-weather"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68525"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68536,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68525\/revisions\/68536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}