Satellite view of Vancouver 2010

The Vancouver region in British Columbia, Canada has a very mild climate offering rain conditions throughout the year. Winter at the base of the mountains is usually short as the temperature is often above zero Celsius and precipitations fall as rain instead of snow. Unfortunately, this year is even warmer than previous years and very little snow can be found on the ground.

Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
Photo taken on January 22 2010 – Download large size image 3.5MB

Many articles, including one of the New York Times, mentions that the lack of snow in the nearby mountains requires that trucks, snowmobiles and even helicopters carry in snow to the competition areas for the Vancouver winter Olympic Games. Hopefully everything will be in place ready for athletes to compete at their best!

Note that the satellite image was taken from crew 22 on the International Space Station. I enhanced the photo in Photoshop and imitated the photo style of the excellent Earth Observatory website.