Saturday December 24, 2022 | 3:00 p.m.
A large number of US states will register freezing temperatures as a major freezing storm, known as a bomb cyclone, leaves millions of homes without power and thousands of travelers stranded on the doorstep of the holiday season.
The phenomenon, caused by an arctic air front, will be responsible for the country experiencing its coldest Christmas since the 1980s.
In fact, more than 175 million people in the US. remain under low wind chill alerts this Saturday morning. The emergency is felt from Montana to Florida, including metropolitan areas like Minneapolis, St. Louis, Atlanta, Houston and Washington, DC.
The coldest wind chill on Saturday morning remains in the Midwest, where temperatures range from 20 to 30 degrees below zero. In fact, places as far south as Atlanta are experiencing negative wind chill early Saturday.
So far 11 people have died on the roads since the storm began in the states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Ohio.
Conditions are very dangerous for traffic, authorities warned.
Millions of people were expected to hit the roads and board flights for the Christmas and New Year holidays, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels of mobility.
More than 1.5 million Americans were without power on Friday, mainly in North and South Carolina, Connecticut and Texas, according to the specialized website Poweroutage.us.
“Please take this storm extremely seriously,” President Joe Biden urged. “I encourage everyone (…) to listen to the warnings at the local level. It’s serious.”
About 7,000 flights have been canceled on Friday and another 7,600 postponed, according to the Flight Aware website. The most affected airports were those of Seattle (northwest), New York, Chicago (north) and Detroit.
ultra fast drop in temperature
Last Friday afternoon, the storm acquired “bomb cyclone” status after air pressure dropped suddenly for 24 hours. This phenomenon produces heavy rains or snow, flooding on the coasts, and hurricane-force winds.
Some of the heaviest snowfall occurred in the north of the country, particularly in the Great Lakes region.
But the phenomenon extends from the Canadian border in the north to the Mexican border in the south, and from the Pacific coast in the northwest to the Atlantic coast in the east, the US meteorologists said.
This low pressure system causes a strong clash between a very cold air mass coming from the Arctic and a tropical one coming from the Gulf of Mexico.
What makes the current situation extraordinary is that the atmospheric pressure plummeted very quickly, in less than 24 hours.
In New York, while the temperature was still hovering around 10°C on Friday morning, it was expected to drop to -10°C by night. In Chicago, it was 20 degrees below zero on Friday morning, and temperatures were negative all the way to the Texas coast.
Canada was also bracing for unusually low temperatures for the season.
Extreme cold, winter storm and even blizzard warnings were issued early Friday for most of Canada, according to Environment Canada.
In Alberta (western Canada) and Saskatchewan (central), temperatures ranged from -40 to -50 degrees.
