NASA Satellite Data Reveals Extent of Snowy Winter Season [VIDEO]

Thanks to polar vortexes and Earth's tilt toward the Sun, many North Americans faced a cold and very snowy winter.

A new compilation of NASA satellite images of the northeast US reveals just how hard the region was hit with snow. The time-lapse animation, which uses satellite images from NASA's GOES-East satellite, gives a day-by-day, snow-by-snow account of winter weather from Jan. 1 - March 24, 2014.

"The once-per-day imagery creates a stroboscopic slide show of persistent brutal winter weather," said Dennis Chesters of the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. who created the animation.

The animation was created by taking the satellite cloud data and overlaying it on top of a true-color image of land and ocean captured by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

Snow is visible on the ground after the flurry of clouds passes by.

This winter has been markedly snowy for many part of North America. By the first day of spring, Washington, D.C. had received more than 30 inches of snow for the 2013-2014 winter season, about twice the annual average.

In Boston, farther north, snow totals were even higher, with the city seeing nearly 60 inches of snow since July 2013. Boston's average annual snowfall is 41 inches.

Other snowbound locales were Buffalo, which received more than 10 feet of snow this winter, and Chicago, which received more than 80 inches.