A winter storm in the Northeast was causing hazardous road conditions on Friday as the upper Midwest was gripped by a deep freeze.
By late Friday morning, New York City had about four inches of snow, bringing out snow plows and slowing down commuters. The Bronx saw five inches.
Parts of New England saw even more.
Between four and seven inches were on the ground in parts of Connecticut, with expectations overall of four to eight inches of snow across New England, said Bill Simpson with the National Weather Service.
Some airports across the Northeast saw scattered flight delays of around an hour.
Public schools in Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and New Haven, Conn., were closed due to snow, NBC News reported. Schools in Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia, Pa., opened late.
The very cold air will chill the Midwest and then the Northeast over the weekend, with temperatures 10 to 25 degrees below average at times, said Chris Dolce, meteorologist for The Weather Channel.
By Saturday, highs will range from the single digits and teens in the interior Northeast and New England to the 20s around New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., wrote Dolce.
Wind chills near zero were forecast for the New York City region late Friday into early Saturday and again late Saturday into early Sunday, the National Weather Service said.
In the Midwest, the extreme cold was made worse by strong winds.
As Chinese President Hu Jintao dined with Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago Thursday night, temperatures in the city dipped below zero Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of 19 below zero, and gusts as high as 25 miles per hour.
By 7 a.m. ET temperatures in the Chicago area had fallen as low as 2 degrees below zero with a wind chill of 19 degrees below, The Chicago Tribune reported.
In the Twin Cities, The Star Tribune reported temperatures as frigid as 15 degrees below zero with no additional wind chill at 6:30 a.m. ET.
And a major storm is looming for next week, said Alex Sosnowski, a meteorologist at AccuWeather.com.
The storm was likely to roll across the Midwest and South, hitting the Atlantic Coast on Monday and Tuesday, where it will encounter the frigid air mass, he wrote on AccuWeather.com.
It is too early to tell if the storm might bring "heavy snow and potentially blizzard conditions" to the Northeast or head out to sea, he wrote.
"It is certainly a storm to watch, as either way it goes will cause problems for millions of people," Sosnowski said. "Certainly contemplating backup plans for travel and alternatives to activities may be in order at this time from the central Plains to the interior South."
