Turkey and Greece

January 29, 2002

Modis_turkey_snow

Provided by: MODIS / Jacques Descloitres; NASA Earth Observatory
Summary authors & editors: Jim Foster

The Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) true color image above was taken on January 13 and shows snow covering most of Turkey, center of image, and Greece, upper left. Thus far, it has been a snowy winter, in the northeastern Mediterranean region. Although, it's not unusual when the mountainous areas of Greece and Turkey are fringed with snow or when the Anatolian Plateau of central Turkey is covered with a veneer of white, rarely do the non mountainous, coastal portions of Greece and Turkey receive substantial snow, as happened earlier this month. The historic Parthenon, in the Greek capital of Athens, was even closed to tourists for a day due to the snowy conditions. Even the island of Crete, lower left, received snow, as did the coastal mountains of Syria (at the very lower right of the image). Note the cloud eddys between Turkey and Greece in the northern Aegean Sea. The Black Sea is at the top of the image, under clouds, and the Mediterranean Sea is at the bottom - the island of Cyprus is at the lower right.

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