The Atacama Desert, in northern Chile, was hit by two consecutive storms that dumped ten times more precipitation on the region than the normal amount for an entire year. This extraordinary weather event even forced one of the world's largest radio telescopes to temporarily shut down.
From the Andes mountain range to the Pacific coast, a rare snowfall blanketed the Atacama Desert in white, recognized as the driest non-polar location on the planet. Although it is not completely unprecedented to see snow in this desert region, a snowfall of this intensity does not occur frequently.
Images captured by NASA's Landsat 8, Landsat 9, and Terra satellites documented the unusual extent of this snow coverage over the desert.
