Severe snow and ice storms will soon sweep the eastern two-thirds of the United States as cold air moves from the Arctic and sinks south of Florida, meteorologists predict.

Starting Saturday, millions of people are expected to experience moderate to heavy snowfall from Kansas City to Washington — including at least 8 inches of snow between central Kansas and Indiana — the National Weather Service warned Friday. . Private meteorologist Ryan Maw said hazardous snow, especially dangerous for power lines — “heavy as paste, hard to move” — is likely as far south as southern Kansas, Missouri, Illinois. , will fall in Indiana and Kentucky and much of the West. Virginia

“It’s going to be a mess, a potential disaster,” Mao said. “It’s something we haven’t seen in a long time.”

National Weather Service meteorologist Alex Lemmers said Friday that the potential for blizzard conditions is increasing, particularly in neighboring parts of Kansas and the central plains, and that wind gusts could reach 50 mph at times. .

Government and private forecasters said that as the storm moved in on Monday, hundreds of thousands of people in the eastern two-thirds of the country would be inundated with dangerous bone-chilling winds and wind chills for the rest of the week. He said temperatures could be 12 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal as the dreaded polar vortex sweeps down from the high Arctic, bringing the wintry weather.

“This could lead to the coldest January for the U.S. since 2011,” AccuWeather Director of Forecast Operations Dan DePodon said Friday. “It’s not just one day, it’s going to be three to five, in some cases a week or more of temperatures well below the historical average.

Danny Baranderan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, said the heaviest-than-normal fall is likely to be centered over the Ohio Valley, but the significant cold snap will extend south to the Gulf Coast.

The forecasts are down slightly from last week, when some computer models predicted the worst winter in decades. Barandiran said that it is unlikely that many cold records will be broken now, but it will still have a big impact on the country.

Even Florida should get a hard freeze, while areas near the Canadian border will be near zero, Barandiran said.

“It’s not going to melt for a while,” Mao said.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodville Climate Research Institute, said the initial winds from the north could startle people after it’s been quite warm the past two years.

“The wind chill is going to be brutal,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of noise, but this is winter. … Just because the world is warming up doesn’t mean these cold snaps are going away.”

Francis and Juda Cohen, director of climate forecasting at the Pvt. Climate change is causing extreme weather, even in winter. Firm environmental and environmental research.

A polar vortex, extremely cold air that circulates at an altitude of 15 to 30 miles, usually resides over the North Pole. But sometimes it escapes or spreads to America, Europe or Asia. And that’s when a large number of people get a severe dose of cold.

Cohen and his colleagues have published a number of studies showing increased drag or rotation of the polar vortex. Cohen, Francis and others published a study last month that attributed the cold outbreak in part to changes in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the rest of the world.

Changes in temperature and loss of Arctic sea ice make the jet stream — the river of air that moves storm fronts — swell, allowing cold air to flow south and sustain extreme weather, Francis said. Permission is granted.

“It’s a really good example of these types of cases,” Francis said.

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