Intense lake-effect snow is hammering Chicago Monday morning and creating harmful journey circumstances as a file November chilly snap sends the jap half of the US into a quick bout of winter.
A slender, however extraordinarily intense band of snow is dumping snow at a price of 3 or extra inches per hour – so quick it may overwhelm the metropolis’s capability to maintain roads clear and create “dangerous to nearly impossible travel conditions,” in line with the National Weather Service. It’s additionally produced thundersnow, wind gusts close to 35 mph and near-zero visibility at its peak.
Snow accumulations could swing wildly block to dam from a couple of inches to greater than a foot primarily based on the actual placement of the slender band. If the band stalls over Chicago, double-digit snow could fall earlier than noon Monday.
Chicago hasn’t had a 10-inch snow since January 2021; the final 10 inch November snow was in 2015; and the greatest November snowfall ever recorded in the metropolis is 12 inches in 1895.
The snow menace stretches past Chicago across the Great Lakes, spawned by an unusually chilly for November mass of Arctic air pushing south and east and threatening dozens of low temperature data as far south as Florida over the subsequent couple of days.
In northwest Indiana, close to Valparaiso, a skilled climate spotter reported 6 inches of snow falling in simply over 2 hours. Numerous stories and videos of thundersnow in downtown Chicago started to roll in after midnight native time.
This brutal setup in Chicago is being pushed by the identical Arctic air mass that’s about to crash across the jap two-thirds of the nation. This isn’t only a “cold front.” This is a full scale polar plunge.
Monday morning shall be the coldest since spring for tens of tens of millions east of the Rockies, and it will get even colder into Tuesday. Low temperatures at or beneath freezing are doable as far south as Texas and Florida and as far east as the Appalachians.
Atlanta does one of the most dramatic temperature flip-flops. Sunday’s excessive there was close to 70. Monday, the metropolis will wrestle to succeed in the higher 30s. Temperatures could tumble into the higher 20s by Tuesday morning, which might be Atlanta’s coldest morning since February. We would anticipate to see temperatures like this in mid-January, not throughout the first half of November.
Daily file lows could be threatened Tuesday morning across components of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, southeast Louisiana and even Florida. That contains locations like Birmingham and Huntsville in Alabama, Baton Rouge in Louisiana, Savannah in Georgia and Tampa and Fort Myers in Florida.
Washington, DC, and New York City are additionally prone to log their coldest morning of the stretch on Tuesday. DC could get up close to 30. New York solely reaches a excessive in the mid-40s Tuesday afternoon. Morning wind chills in each cities could sit in the decrease to mid-20s, however Chicago’s setup is uniquely risky as a result of of how the Arctic air is interacting with the heat lake.
There shall be snow in different areas as properly — it simply received’t appear to be Chicago’s concentrated burst. Lake-effect snow continues downwind of the Great Lakes. The west slopes of the central Appalachians could decide up a number of inches Monday. Higher elevations from West Virginia by the border of North Carolina and Tennessee can anticipate accumulating snow.
The excellent news: The chilly snap received’t stick round lengthy. Temperatures across the central US rebound rapidly on Tuesday, and most of the East warms up once more on Wednesday.