Massive winter storm to clobber US from Plains to East Coast

Millions of Americans from the Plains to the East Coast faced the threat of blizzards, heavy snow, treacherous ice and freezing rain through Jan 6, the National Weather Service said on Jan 4.

Governors in Kentucky and Virginia declared states of emergency ahead of the winter storm.

“The storm is still taking shape,” meteorologist Rich Bann of the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Weather Prediction Centre said on the evening of Jan 4. “But this thing has multiple hazards, from heavy snows in the Plains to significant icing covering roads farther south.”

He added that more than 60 million people in the US were affected by winter weather warnings, watches or advisories this weekend.

A swath extending eastwards from Nebraska and Kansas through Ohio, Indiana, south-western Pennsylvania and north-western Virginia could see from 2.54cm to 30cm of snow. Ice could knock out power lines and cause widespread outages.

The agency also warned that areas from north-eastern Kansas to north-central Missouri would see “the heaviest snowfall in a decade”.

A wintry mess of freezing rain and ice will hit southern Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee on Jan 5, Mr Bann said, likely making roads hazardous and downing power lines.

“It’ll be nearly impossible to drive in some areas,” he said.

Mr Bann said that the storm should move past the East Coast and into the Atlantic Ocean by late on Jan 6, but a new blast of Arctic air will bring frigid cold to the eastern two-thirds of the US by the middle of next week.

Scientists say extreme weather is becoming more common and more severe as a result of man-made climate change.

Travel disruptions

The first major storm of 2025 was already wreaking havoc on travel, with Kansas City International Airport announcing closure of its flight operations on Jan 4 “due to rapid ice accumulation”.

Flight operations resumed later after airfield runways and taxiways were treated, Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas said in a social media post.

Parts of the eastern states of New York and Pennsylvania are facing “heavy lake-effect snow” coming off the Great Lakes that could dump as much as 61cm there, according to the NWS.

Forecast company AccuWeather said on Jan 5 that the lake-effect snow total in the region, already blanketed in snow this week, could top more than 1.2m.

The NWS said that a blizzard will rage across the Central Plains by early Jan 5, and “white-out conditions will make travel extremely hazardous, with impassable roads and a high risk of motorists becoming stranded”.

Washington could be blanketed in 12.7cm or more of snow, with up to 25cm possible in nearby areas.

With the jet stream diving southward, temperatures are expected to plunge, in some places to below minus 18 deg C, while strong wind gusts will compound the dangers.

The mercury could sink tens of degrees below seasonal norms down to the US Gulf Coast. Before then, severe thunderstorms are expected across the lower Mississippi Valley, the NWS forecast.

Another major concern is freezing rain and sleet expected from Kansas eastward to Kentucky and Virginia, setting the stage for thick ice to coat roads, making travel hazardous, bringing down trees and electricity lines, and potentially leaving millions of customers without power during a cold snap.

The NWS warned that it expected widespread tree damage and “long-lasting power outages” from Kansas to the central Appalachian Mountains.

Conditions could prove especially perilous in the Appalachians, where a deadly hurricane in late September 2024 devastated communities and ravaged multiple southeastern states including Kentucky.

Many of those communities are still recovering from the effects of that hurricane.

The new storm “will likely cause significant disruption and dangerous conditions on our roads and could cause significant power outages just 24 hours or so before it’s going to get really cold in Kentucky”, Governor Andy Beshear told an emergency meeting. REUTERS, AFP