Ninety-four million people across the northern U.S. from the Plains to the Great Lakes as well as the Northeast were under winter weather alerts Saturday night, as a fast-moving storm threatened to foul roads and create dangerous, icy conditions from the Dakotas to Maine.
The most severe conditions were expected in the Northeast, which could see 6 to 12 inches of snow Saturday evening and into Sunday morning, with forecasters expecting limited visibility. The biggest cities in the Northeast can expect significant snowfall, with 3 to 5 inches in New York City and 4 to 8 inches in Boston expected.
New York City had recorded only trace amounts of snow late Saturday, but the weather service office there said powder was hitting the ground at a rate of 1.5 inches an hour in nearby Harrison, New Jersey, and it asked motorists to stay off roads if possible.
"Snow is really coming down out there now," it said on X.
In a news release, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said the city was preparing to help at-risk Bostonians, including older residents and those experiencing homelessness.
Emergency shelters in Boston would be open 24 hours a day and street outreach teams would be traveling the city in outreach vans, the release said.
In a post on X, Boston Logan International Airport said it expected “delays and cancellations” due to the storm.
Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia could receive a mixture of snow, sleet and freezing rain, and ice could form in some areas.
The weather service office in Pittsburgh posted photos of a snow-covered roadway to X and said, "Please get off the roads if you can."
The system tracked over the Great Lakes region first, leaving between 5 and 8 inches of coverage in northern parts of the Twin Cities. Around 4 to 8 inches of snow had been expected in the region by nightfall Saturday, forecasters said.
Snowfall of 6 to 9 inches has been recorded in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin as the low pressure front moved into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Saturday night, according to the National Weather Service and NBC News meteorologists.
“There’s quite a few accidents across the Twin Cities and there have been most of the morning,” Melissa Dye, a National Weather Meteorologist based in Chanhassen, Minnesota, said Saturday morning. “We are still getting some pretty moderate to heavy snow here.”
Dye said the snow was easily transported by the wind.
The snow was the result of a low-pressure system moving rapidly from west to east, federal forecasters said, from the Ohio Valley on Saturday to the northern Mid-Atlantic and Northeast overnight.
A wintry mix of rain, sleet and freezing rain was being reported from the Ohio Valley to the Mid-Atlantic, where power outages and downed trees are possible, according to a national forecast from the National Weather Service.
Ice warnings were in effect in Central Appalachia, which could receive a quarter inch of ice.
Only trace amounts of snow showed up in weather service data for Cleveland and Buffalo, New York, late Saturday, but the white stuff was still expected overnight.
By Sunday afternoon, forecasters expected the system to have moved off the terrestrial map and over the Atlantic, but they warned power outages, downed tree branches and icy roads could remain from New York to Boston.
The northern U.S. plunged into a prolonged cold spell last month, as Arctic outbreaks pushed temperatures in many parts of the nation well below typical averages. That trend has continued in February.
That doesn't mean that the effects of climate change are easing. Copernicus, a European climate monitoring program, reported that January 2025 was the warmest on record and about 3 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial temperature averages.
"Temperatures were most notably below average over the United States," read a recent Copernicus report.
Long-term forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expect temperatures to remain colder than typical across the northern U.S. for the next one to two weeks.
