What passes for winter in New York City this year: pedestrians navigate a burst of wet snow in lower Manhattan on Saturday, January 06, 2024. At Central Park, the storm yielded only 0.2 inches of wet snow. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Like a diva who keeps the audience waiting for a grand entrance, the winter of 2023-24 hasn’t been in any hurry to enter full force across most of the United States. Over the next few days, though, things should look and feel much stormier and a lot more seasonable across many parts of the country. During the next couple of weeks, a rapid-fire sequence of major midlatitude cyclones will sweep across the central and eastern United States, bringing a cornucopia of wild weather from tornadoes to blizzard conditions. The snow and cold may fall well short of record territory but will still be a dramatic change, given the eerie warmth and snowlessness that ruled the holiday period over some of the most reliably wintry parts of the nation. (We’ll have more on December’s impressive heat records in our monthly U.S. roundup post on Tuesday, January 9.) To get a quick sense of what’s going on, consider the National Weather Service’s all-hazards map issued at midday Monday (Figure 1). It includes a startlingly widespread and diverse set of threats that collectively will touch nearly every U.S. state over the next several days. Here’s a sampling: Blizzard warning (dark red): New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Idaho, Washington Winter storm warning (pink): Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois Winter storm watch (blue): California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine, Michigan Flood watches (dark green): Hawaii, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine High wind warning […]
Click here to visit source. Real winter finally roars into the United States