US meteorologists have warned of dangerous holiday travel and life-threatening cold weather in much of the country as an arctic air mass pushes into the already frigid south. of the nation
“We are facing temperatures well below normal, potentially record low temperatures heading into the Christmas holidays,” warned Zack Taylor, a specialist with the National Weather Service.
The “unusual and dangerous arctic air mass will likely bring prolonged and extreme freezing conditions to southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana,” the agency said in a special weather statement Sunday.
The Service forecast temperatures as low as minus 10.6 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit) in Jackson, Mississippi, and as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius (-5 degrees Fahrenheit) in Nashville by Thursday night. , Tennessee.
The arctic air intake comes as a previous storm system in the northeastern United States is gradually retreating after burying parts of the region under two feet (60 centimeters) of snow. More than 80,000 New England customers were still without power as of Sunday morning, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks outages across the country.
For much of the United States, winter weather will get worse before it gets better. Next week will bring with it the possibility of a “significant winter storm” in the eastern two-thirds of the United States during the second half of the week, just before Christmas, according to the latest forecast from the Federal Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. .
“The main weather story to grab the weather headlines next week will be the huge stretch of freezing temperatures, from the Rocky Mountains north and the Northern Plains to the Midwest by midweek, then reaching the coast. of the Gulf of Mexico and much of the eastern United States on Friday and into the weekend,” the Center warned.
“An extremely strong arctic front will usher in the coldest air of the season by a considerable margin with widespread sub-zero readings expected for overnight lows from the northern Rockies to the north-central Great Plains and part of the Arctic. upper part of the north central region of the country, reaching as far south as northern Oklahoma and southern Missouri.”