Rare white Christmas in Seattle, Portland as 'thundersnow' hits Boston
People around the U.S. are waking up to a white Christmas.
Seattle and Portland -- two cities that aren't exactly known for heavy snowfall this time of year -- are both seeing a fair bit of snow on Monday.
Large swaths of the Midwest and Northeast also woke up to plenty of the white stuff coating lawns, trees, and cars.
And that's not all.
Some lucky Boston residents awake early enough on Christmas morning got treated to one of the rarest and most treasured of weather events: thundersnow.
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Yes, thundersnow is exactly what it sounds like. Effectively, it just means that there was a lightning strike along with heavy snowfall.
Thundersnow is rare, but the potential for it was actually predicted by some clutch meteorologists about 12 hours before it occurred.
Boston isn't out of the woods yet, either.
The snowstorm is rapidly intensifying, and the National Weather Service is predicting snowfall rates of about 2 inches per hour.
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Portland, for its part, of course stayed weird as snow fell on Christmas Eve.
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And Seattle's well-known landmarks look even better covered in snow.
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Other parts of the U.S. also got a White Christmas this year.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
