English: Heavy snowfall brought by Storm Filomena hit Spain in January 2021, and persisted on the ground for many days across much of the country, as this Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite image shows.
During this period, temperatures plunged to −35.8 °C at Vega de Liordes ^[1] in the Picos de Europa, a new lowest temperature record for the country. The city of Teruel, east of Madrid, reached -25 ºC, while another seven province capitals also reached temperatures under -10 ºC, overall Spain's coldest night in at least 20 years ^[2].
Madrid had its heaviest snowfall in five decades, reaching up to 60 cm in accumulation ^[3]. It was one of the worst affected areas, being unprepared for this amount of snow, and being brought to a standstill with the airport having to be closed, trains cancelled and roads blocked. People in central Spain struggled with the deep freeze that followed the heavy snow.
While the idea of snuggling under a blanket in the cold winter months is very appealing, the blanket that covers half of Spain is not remotely comforting. This satellite image, captured on 12 January at 11:40 CET, shows much of the country facing hazardous conditions following the snow that fell during the weekend of the 8th - 10th of January.

Copernicus Sentinel-3 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a suite of cutting-edge instruments to measure systematically Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics. For example, with a swath width of 1270 km, the ocean and land colour instrument, which acquired the two tiles for this image, provides global coverage every two days.