The California Snow Storm System Embedded in the Upper Mississippi River Valley: Indirect Detection of High-Wildness, Unseen Scenarios, Wind and Hail
A dangerous cross- country path has been cut off since the beginning of the week by the storm system.
The storm blanketed some mountain areas of drought-parched California with thick snow, including Soda Springs in the northern part of the state, which received 60 inches of snow in 48 hours.
A multi-day storm threat begins Monday for parts of the South and central US. The threat of severe weather has been issued for parts of western Kansas and Oklahoma.
The threat does, however, strengthen as the system heads east Tuesday, likely impacting a large swath of the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Some areas in Louisiana and Mississippi could see tornadoes, high wind gusts and damaging hail.
The Upper Midwest, including Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin, saw more than a foot of snow this week.
Winter storm warnings were in place overnight for the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, where an additional foot of snow could fall in the highest elevations before 4 a.m.
The freeways of the state were closed on Saturday because of “blowing snow and near-zero visibility,” with authorities saying on social media that it was due to icy and dangerous conditions.
“The snowpack is about 225% of normal, so it’s more than twice what we’d be expecting this time in December,” said Mark Deutschendorf, forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Reno.
It looks like Christmas out here. It stuck to everything and did not come with a lot of wind. It’s like a picture postcard.”
While he noted the snow totals so far are impressive, Deutschendorf said he is “cautiously optimistic” about this precipitation putting a big dent in the state’s drought.
The Olympic Valley Snowfalls: A Record-Breaking 24 Hour Weather System that Retains Danger in Northeastern New England
The ski resort posted a picture on its website of thick snow covered in Olympic Valley, California.
This storm is definitely going to be remembered. Since December 1st, we have gotten 7.5 feet of snow. Plus, in just 24 hours from Saturday morning to Sunday morning, we received more than 35 inches of snow — the 6th largest snowfall total in 24 hours that we have on record,” resort operators wrote.
More than a foot of snow was dumped in some parts of interior New England and officials warn of dangerous travel conditions the weekend before Christmas.
In response to the massive storm system, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned residents of the hazardous road conditions the storm is threatening to bring as millions across in the Northeast are under winter weather alerts Friday.
“We urge everyone in the impacted regions to avoid unnecessary travel tonight and tomorrow,” Hochul said in a Thursday statement. “Work from home if possible, stay off the roads, and make sure you and your loved ones remain vigilant.”
In Pennsylvania, transportation officials implored drivers to avoid unnecessary travel due to low visibility caused by wind and heavy snow.
The weather in Western New York was so bad that temperatures plunged to minus 22 degrees when taken into account the wind chill. The region accounted for 27 of the overall storm-related deaths across the country.
The storm, part of a weather system that wreaked havoc in the South, left thousands in the dark as it moved through the Northeast, where the temperature is now below freezing.
And in parts of the Mid-Atlantic, the storm brought a quarter inch of ice was reported Thursday morning to the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and Maryland, and about a tenth of an inch had built up in parts of Virginia.
Thousands of people were without proper heating in the Upper Midwest when powerful winds whirled by the cold, knocking down power lines.
The death of two children and two children in Louisiana is caused by a severe tornado on Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2005, according to the National Weather Service
Smith and her son were killed in Louisiana on Tuesday when a tornado destroyed their home, local officials said.
Another tornado in northern Louisiana traveled through the town of Farmerville was rated an EF-3, with 140 mph winds, according to the National Weather Service. At least 20 people were injured and parts of an apartment complex and a mobile home park were torn down by a tornado.
About 1.2 million customers in the US are experiencing power outages amid the winter weather and frigid temperatures, according to the website PowerOutage.US. New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New York have all had some kind of power failure.
Vermont State police said they responded to a number of crashes on friday and advised drivers to slow down. Some roads were also closed due to the storm impact.
Over a 36-hour period, 24.5 inches of snow fell in the Vermont town of Wilmington as well as more than 19 inches in Landgrove and Ludlow, the weather service said.
Lingering lake-effect snows blowing on the Great Lakes will slowly become less intense, while the air in the eastern half of the nation will be slow to moderate, according to the National Weather Service.
Plus, up to 2 feet of snow can accumulate in areas near or south of Buffalo, New York. “These snow bands are likely to be very narrow and lead to drastically changing conditions over a short distance,” the weather service added.
“Snow showers are gradually coming to an end across the region with only light scattered snow showers expected through Saturday morning,” the weather service said.
Auto crashes in New York City, Ohio, as a result of a low-temperature winter storm, and one person died in Kansas City
All modes of travel – planes, trains and automobiles – were being disrupted: There were hundreds of miles of road closures and flight cancellations were growing rapidly. In New York, flooding along the Long Island Rail Road forced part of the Long Beach branch to temporarily shut down.
Christmas is not happening at all, as Mick Saunders said after being in the snow for two hours. Everyone in the family agreed it was safer this way.
The state of Ohio Nine people have died as a result of weather-related auto crashes, including four in a Saturday morning crash on Interstate 75, when a semi tractor-trailer crossed the median and collided with an SUV and a pickup, authorities said.
In Kansas City, one person died after losing control of their Dodge Caravan on icy roads Thursday afternoon, according to the Kansas City Police Department. “The Dodge went down the embankment, over the cement retaining wall and landed upside down, submerged in Brush Creek,” police said in a statement.
About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory over the holiday weekend. Between the Great Lakes and the Rio Grande, there was a cold spell.
“The National Weather Service’s Watch Warning graphic depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever,” the agency said Thursday.
The press conference was held Friday afternoon, and Hochul said it was called a kitchen sink storm. Mother nature had everything she could handle this weekend, and it was freezing.
Brian Trzeciak lived through the storm at his home in New York. Buffalo’s airport, just to the north, reported zero visibility shortly after noon on Friday.
A Category 2 Hurricane Forecast from the Great Lakes to the Appalachians: Icy Conditions at Seattle Airport and a Winter Storm Warning
“My mother lives about 30 minutes away and so does my sister and her family, in the other direction,” he said. We all stay in our houses until Monday with no plans to go out for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
As it heads east across the country, the storm will become a “bomb cyclone”, rapidly gaining strength, and dropping 24 millibars of pressure in 24 hours. As the storm moved to the Great Lakes, it was predicted that it would have the same pressure as a Category 2 Hurricane.
Emergency measures have been put in place by governors in 13 states, including Georgia and North Carolina. National Guard units have been activated in states that have declared a state of emergency.
There were nearly 5,300 canceled Friday flights by 7:30p.m.
Friday will bring record-low temperatures to a large portion of the US, including from the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys and stretching from the Southeast to the central Appalachians.
It is a dangerous wind chill. The plummeting temperatures will be accompanied by high winds, which will create dangerous wind chills across nearly all the central to eastern US.
• Whiteout conditions: Blizzard conditions may exist even if snowfall stops, because high winds can pick up snow already on the ground and cause low visibility.
The ice caused the closure of runways at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where nearly half of flights going into and out of the airport were canceled, according to FlightAware. Further, all express services for Sound Transit, a regional transportation network in the Seattle metro area, were suspended Friday due to the icy conditions.
There is a winter storm warning in effect for northeastern Oregon from 4 to 10 p.m. The snow and sleet could accumulate up to one inch, while the ice could accumulate from 2 to.4 inches. If the wind is cold it can be fatal on exposed skin in as little as 30 minutes.
Autonomous Emergency Services in Erie County, Fla. During the Christmas Day Breakout, Rescue Vehicles and Emergency Preparedness vans were stuck in the snow
Emergency and recovery vehicles that were sent out to help have gotten stuck in the snow as rescuers fanned out on Christmas Day. The officials said that eleven of the ambulances had to be abandoned.
“The rescue team was rescuing rescuers … it was so horrible,” Erie County executive Mark Poloncarz said during a news conference Sunday. Many of New York’s weather-related fatalities were in Erie County, where some people were found dead in cars and on the street in snowbanks, he said.
Hundreds of National Guard troops have been deployed to help with rescue efforts in New York. The governor said state police had been involved in over 500 rescues by Sunday, including helping a man with 4% left on his mechanical heart.
“We’re still in the throes of this very dangerous life-threatening situation,” Hochul said, urging residents to stay off the roads as a driving ban remains in place in Erie County through Monday.
“Our state and county plows have been out there, nonstop, giving up time and putting themselves in danger, driving through blinding snowstorms to clear the roads,” Hochul said.
As blistering blizzard conditions swept the region, about 500 motorists found themselves stranded in their vehicles Friday night into Saturday morning, according to Poloncarz, who described frightening conditions on the road.
“Think about looking just a few feet in front of you at a sheet of white for more than 24 hours in a row. He said it was like that in the worst conditions. It was so white out that nobody could see where they were going. There was no idea what was happening.
While the streets of Buffalo are covered in abandoned vehicles, conditions inside homes are not easy to navigate.
Some residents have remained in their homes for the last 56 hours, some without power in the freezing cold, Hochul said during the press conference. This is not due to a lack of resources, the governor said, but rather a mobility and access challenge faced by utility companies.
There are 12,000 Erie County homes and businesses that were without power on Sunday night and many will not have their lights and heating restored until Tuesday.
More than 10 million people were under freeze alerts across the South Monday, including residents in Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Mobile, Montgomery and Birmingham.
• Colorado: Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reported two deaths related to the cold since Thursday, with one man found near a power transformer of a building possibly looking for warmth, and another in a camp in an alleyway.
Lake-effect snows have made for hazardous travel conditions for the next couple of days, and conditions are expected to improve over the week.
The low-pressure system is forecast to move farther away into Canada, while another system quickly across the northern US into Monday, bringing snow from the northern Plains through the Midwest.
Much of the rest of the eastern part of the country will still be in a deep freeze through Monday before a moderating trend sets in on Tuesday, forecasters said.
For six days, a blast of polar air from Canada has been wrecking holiday travel plans as it lumbers across the country, leaving power outages, canceled flights and dangerous roads in its wake.
Buffalo Counties and the Niagara Region had a Snow-Push Record: State of the Art and Predictions for the Next Generation of Winter Weather Forecasts
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told NPR’s Morning Edition that his city’s emergency responders went “car by car” to rescue stranded motorists.
“This storm is a once-in-a- generation storm,” Brown said. It’s unlike anything the city of Buffalo has experienced before.
“That number is now below 10,000, and we will continue to work aggressively and strategically with National Grid all day today to continue to reduce that number and get everyone’s power restored,” he added, referring to the local utility.
Over the course of the week, many communities on the coast lost power but the worst of it appeared to have passed. A mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM interconnection, said Sunday that utilities could meet the day’s demand after it initially asked 65 million customers to conserve energy amid Saturday’s freeze.
As the week goes on, the Weather Service expects conditions to become milder but still hazardous on Monday before gradually improving on Tuesday.
That may be good news for winter travelers. Airports continued to report thousands of flight cancellations and delays Monday morning, with those flying to or from the Great Lakes region looking most impacted.
The NWS still says that people should stay inside, as a combination of high wind speeds and low temperatures can cause frostbite in a matter of minutes.
In New York’sLewis County, the village of Copenhagen was buried in snow. Driving conditions were so difficult that even snowplows had a tough time navigating the roads, CNN affiliate WWNY reported.
The Michigan area set a daily maximum snowfall record with 10.9 inches of snow on Sunday. This beats the old record of 8 inches received back on December 25, 1992.