A dangerous winter storm is bearing down on the Northeast and Midwest Thursday morning, bringing hazardous travel conditions and slippery roads.
By early in the morning, Central Park in New York City had already seen a half an inch of snow and winter weather advisories were in place across New York. Many schools were delayed or closed during the storm across the tri-state area.
“We urge all New Yorkers to continue to exercise caution when traveling,” the New York City Public School District said in a social media post.
Forecasters in Chicago said that the storm could bring briefly heavy snow of up to three inches in just a few hours Thursday morning.
“Snow then changes to sleet/light freezing rain with diminishing intensity. Temperatures remain near or below freezing through Thursday afternoon,” it wrote.
Crashes were reported in Des Moines, Iowa, according to WHO 13.
Between two to five inches of snow are anticipated in much of New England, and up to half an inch of ice was possible across parts of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
More than 54,000 customers are without power in the Mountain State, where water rescues were underway due to heavy flooding around the western hub of Charlotte. Outages also extended to Pennsylvania, where just nearly 1,800 customers were affected, according to outage tracker PowerOutage.US.
In Philadelphia, dozens of flights were canceled, with tracker FlightAware reporting more had been impacted in Boston and New York.
While the storm is expected to progress eastward on Thursday, the eastern U.S. won’t see much a break . Another storm is forecast to follow by the weekend with similar impacts, according to forecasting company AccuWeather.
It will shift across the Plains and Ohio Valley through Friday night, spreading rain, ice, and snow.
“The storm this weekend is just the next in a series of storms that is part of the pattern change that began late last week,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Joe Lundberg.
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