As the calendar turned to November 2024, Japan’s iconic volcano and highest peak, Mount Fuji, still awaited the first snowfall of the season.
As the calendar turned to November 2024, Japan’s iconic volcano and highest peak, Mount Fuji, still awaited the first snowfall of the season. When white did appear on its flanks on November 6, it was the latest in the year for the mountain’s first seasonal snowfall since records began 130 years ago. That beats the previous record of October 26, which occurred in both 1955 and 2016.
Ground and aerial photos from November 6 showed Mount Fuji with a fresh coating of snow on its peak. A local office of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) officially confirmed the presence of snow on November 7, according to news reports; clouds had obstructed their view of the mountain the previous day.
By the time the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired this image (right) on November 9, the new snow appears to have melted. For comparison, an image from October 30, 2023 (left), acquired by the OLI-2 on Landsat 9, shows the mountain clad in white. That year, the first snow on Mount Fuji came on October 5, a more typical time for this annual milestone.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
