02:25
Millions of Americans face extreme cold as Arctic blast threatens Christmas travel
Arctic ‘bomb cyclone’ grips US, sparking Biden warning
- A once-in-a-generation winter storm could see temperatures plunge to as low as -40 degrees Celsius
- The freezing weather has caused Christmas travel chaos with thousands of flights in the US cancelled
A dangerously frigid arctic air mass gripped a vast expanse of the United States ahead of what could be one of the coldest Christmas Days on record, as a looming winter storm threatened to upend travel plans for millions of Americans.
Leading into the holiday weekend, the impending storm was expected to bring blizzard conditions to the Great Lakes region, up to 5cm (2 inches) of rain followed by a flash freeze on the East Coast, wind gusts of 100km/h (60mph) and bitter cold as far south as the Mexican border.
As the storm took shape over the Great Lakes on Thursday, a weather phenomenon known as a bomb cyclone was likely to develop from a “rapidly deepening low-pressure” system, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
The cyclone could spawn snowfalls of a 1.25 cm per hour and howling winds gusting to 97km/h from the Upper Midwest to the interior Northeast, producing blizzard conditions and near-zero visibility, the weather service said.
Combined with the arctic cold, wind-chill factors as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius (40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) were forecast in the High Plains, the northern Rockies and Great Basin, the NWS said.
Exposure to such conditions without adequate protection can cause frostbite within minutes.
Power outages were likely, and the storm was expected to make travel precarious or impossible at times.
“It’s dangerous and threatening,” US President Joe Biden said at the White House, urging Americans with travel plans to not delay and to set off on Thursday. “This is not like a snow day, when you were a kid, this is serious stuff.”
Well over half of the Lower 48 states, from Washington state to Florida, were under winter weather alerts, including wind chill advisories affecting about 200 million people, the weather service said.
Parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Plains could see Christmas Day weather near the coldest on record, according to the NWS.
The mercury was expected to fall to minus 9 degrees in Philadelphia on Sunday, near a previous low from 1943, while Sioux City, Iowa, could end up at minus 26 degrees, surpassing a record from the 1980s.
The storm front could bring more than 30cm of snow to some areas as it moves eastward out of the Plains and Great Lakes, weather service meteorologist Ashton Cook said. Snow squalls were expected from Illinois to Indiana, and could produce white-out conditions.
Conditions were cold enough for people to post videos of themselves carrying out the “boiling water challenge”, where boiling water is thrown into the air and instantly freezes.
“We created our own cloud @ -17° F (-27° C) at the #Missoula International Airport,” tweeted NWS Missoula in Montana.
The American Automobile Association estimates 112.7 million people planned to travel 80km or more from home between December 23 and January 2, up 3.6 million travelers over last year and closing in on pre-pandemic numbers.
More than 4,500 US flights scheduled for Thursday and Friday were canceled, with two major airports in Chicago accounting for over 1,200 of the cancellations, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.
Madison Painter told CNN she and her fiance had decided to drive 1,100km after their flight from Chicago to Atlanta had been cancelled.
“I wanted to get home to our families,” she said.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg
