A twice as severe winter is about to hit much of the U.S. with snow, ice and biting cold.

Meteorologists predict that strong snow and ice storms and subsequent bitter cold will soon hit two-thirds of the eastern United States as frigid air leaves the North Pole and moves south as far as Florida.

Starting Saturday, millions of people from Kansas City to Washington will experience moderate to heavy snow (at least 8 inches of snow likely between central Kansas and Indiana), the National Weather Service says. warned on Friday. Private meteorologist Ryan Maue said the dangerous ice, especially deadly to power lines, is “as heavy as paste and difficult to move,” just south of southern Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. There is a possibility of ice forming across much of the state, Indiana, and Kentucky and the West. Virginia.

“There will be chaos and a potential disaster,” Maue said. “This is something we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Alex Lammers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Friday that the chance of a snowstorm is increasing, especially in nearby areas of Kansas and the Central Plains, with wind gusts potentially reaching 80 mph.

Once the storm clears up on Monday, hundreds of millions of people in the eastern two-thirds of the country will be caught in bone-chilling and dangerous air and wind chills throughout the week, government and private forecasters said. Ta. Temperatures could be 12 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (7 to 14 degrees Celsius) colder than normal as a deadly polar vortex stretches from the Arctic highlands, bringing in cold air.

“This could result in the coldest January in the United States since 2011,” AccuWeather Director of Forecast Operations Dan DePodwin said Friday. “This isn’t just one day. We’re going to see three to five days, maybe a week or more, of temperatures well below historical averages.”

Danny Valandiaran, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, said the biggest drops in below-normal temperatures will likely be concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but significant cold temperatures will move south to the Gulf Coast. .

Forecasts have eased slightly since last week, when some computer models predicted the worst cold snap in decades. Although many cold records are now unlikely to be broken, they will still have a big impact on the country, Varandyaran said.

Valandiaran said Florida should see a deeper freeze, but areas near the Canadian border will see near zero.

“It won’t be solved for a while,” Maue said.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Institute, said the past few years have been fairly warm, but the first gusts of wind from the north could come as a shock to people.

“The wind chill will be brutal,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot of whining, but it’s winter now. … Just because the planet is getting warmer doesn’t mean the cold snaps are going away.”

This twice as bad weather may be due in part to the rapid warming of the Arctic, and serves as a not-so-gentle reminder that climate change can bring more extreme weather, even in the winter. Frances Cohen and Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasts at the Civil Weather Service, said. Atmospheric Environment Research Company.

A polar vortex is a spinning super-cold air that resembles a crest 15 to 30 miles high and is usually trapped above the North Pole. But sometimes it escapes or spreads to the United States, Europe, and Asia. And it is during this period that many people catch severe colds.

Cohen et al. published several studies showing an increase in the elongation or wandering of the polar vortex. Last month, Cohen, Francis and colleagues published a study showing that these cold-wave outbreaks are due in part to changes from the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.

Changing temperatures and diminishing sea ice in the Arctic could disrupt the jet stream, the river of air that drives storm fronts, forcing cold air southward and continuing extreme weather, Francis said.

What is about to happen is “a really good example of this type of incident,” Francis said.

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