A person bundles up against the cold weather while walking in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., January 11, 2022.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
A spring nor’easter has already dropped at least a foot of snow on parts of New York and Pennsylvania, leading to power outages and the closure of businesses and schools.
More than 240,000 customers were without power in the Northeast Tuesday morning. New York had the most outages at more than 160,000, while Pennsylvania had more than 50,000, according to PowerOutage.us.
Piseco, in upstate New York, had seen the most snowfall by Tuesday morning, with 14 inches on the ground. Broome County to the south got just nearly a foot and implemented a travel ban.
The heavy, wet snow was falling at a rate of 1 to 2 inches per hour across upstate New York.
In Syracuse, the rapid snowfall and outages prompted numerous school and business closures.
Forecasters said the snow is expected to taper through the day, but not before dropping 3 to 6 more inches. The highest totals will be in the Adirondack Mountains.
High winds will stay in place through the night, long after the snow stops.
Nantucket, Massachusetts, will likely see wind gusts of 43 mph, while Islip, on New York’s Long Island, will see 39 mph gusts.
An “abnormally chilly air-mass” in the east will remain through the middle of the week, according to the National Weather Service.
“A handful of daily record cold high and low temperatures are forecast in parts of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Northeast today,” the weather service said.
About 40 million people were under frost and freeze alerts Tuesday morning stretching from the central Plains to the mid-Atlantic.
Temperatures 15 to 25 degrees below average will make highs Tuesday and Wednesday feel more like March than April.
The region will get a chance to thaw out later in the week when a warmup is expected.
