It’s not all one mega-storm: While Arctic cold is permeating from the north, the snowfall is coming from a variety of systems.
Parts of the South woke up to a blanket of snow on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, joining a large swath of other Lower 48 states that are in the icy grip of winter. Arctic air has brought breathtaking cold to much of the U.S. — and it’s not going away any time soon.
Schools that closed for the holiday were free to marvel at the snowfall along with everyone else.
„Snow. SNOW!“ as the University of Mississippi proclaimed on Instagram.
From Shreveport, La., to Cheboygan, Mich., snow coated streets, homes and fields early Monday, creating beautiful scenery but also prompting warnings of treacherous driving conditions and life-threatening cold. Even slightly warmer areas were under threat, as freezing rain glazed roadways and created slippery conditions.
Winter’s dangers were clear in Oregon, where a storm brought strong winds and freezing temperatures over the weekend. More than 100,000 accounts still lacked power Monday morning, according to the monitoring site PowerOutage.us.
„At least four people may have died of weather-related causes,“ Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. Likely causes of death ranged from hypothermia to one tree that fell on an RV and another that fell on a house.Where’s all this snow coming from?
Cold air primed the ground for snow to fall: as of Sunday, nearly 100 million people in the U.S. were under weather alerts for extreme cold.
It’s not all one mega-storm: While Arctic cold is permeating from the north, the snowfall is coming from a variety of systems, from the southern jet stream near the Gulf of Mexico to the lake effect near the Great Lakes.
Northern Michigan is caught in the middle of a one-two punch, starting with a low-pressure system that brought snow on Friday. Then heavy lake effect snowfall started hitting the area, along with western and Upstate New York, where „life-threatening blizzard-like conditions“ prompted travel bans.
