More than 150 million people across the central and eastern United States have endured snow, freezing rain, sleet, or bitter cold since Friday, January 23. The storm, which grounded more than 11,000 flights on Sunday alone – making it the biggest day of aviation disruption since the pandemic – brought many towns and cities to a multiday standstill. At least 30 storm-related deaths had been reported by late Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
This Arctic blast could end up rivaling the Texas-centered winter storm of February 2021 as the costliest in modern U.S. history after inflation, according to Adam Smith at Climate Central, as reported by the Associated Press. That 2021 storm caused around $28 billion in damage (USD 2025), according to the billion-dollar-disaster website created by Smith at NOAA and now based at Climate Central.
The storm’s arc of icy precipitation, which caused misery from Texas to Maine – including high-end bursts of sleet – was long gone by Tuesday. The suffering was far from over, though. According to poweroutage.us, nearly 400,000 customers remained without power on Wednesday morning. Most of them were in and near the lower Mississippi Valley, where freezing rain had brought down countless trees and power lines.
One of the hardest-hit big cities was Nashville, where more than 90% of customers had lost power at the storm’s peak. Parts of northern Mississippi, Louisiana, and far eastern Texas were also hit especially hard.
The storm also complicated the start of the 2026 annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. Sunday’s flight cancellations kept many attendees from getting into town on opening day, and widespread closures in the host city of Houston made downtown a semi-ghost town. Freezing rain stayed just northwest of the city core, though, and remote access for off-site speakers as well as attendees helped the conference get rolling despite the disruption. And the student conference kicked off on Saturday, just ahead of the storm’s worst.
Much of the nation will remain encased in cold air near or below freezing for another week or so, including some of the areas where power has yet to be restored. The prolonged cold poses a real threat of hypothermia for people who lack adequate shelter, and it also spikes the risk of carbon monoxide inhalation from unsafe use of ever-more-popular home generators.
There’s also an increasing chance of a rare heavy snowfall this weekend over parts of coastal North Carolina and Virginia, including the possibility of snow and high winds along the beaches of the Outer Banks. The wintry weather could extend to eastern Long Island and southeast New England, depending on how close to the U.S. East Coast this powerful system ends up. On the back side of the coastal storm, the coldest air in at least 16 years could reach Florida.
From record-heavy snow in Toronto to a deluge of sleet in D.C.
Some of the heaviest snowfall from this weekend’s storm fell just north of the U.S. border, along the north side of Lake Ontario. Toronto Pearson International Airport, the official reporting site at Canada’s largest city, measured 46 centimeters (18 inches) on Sunday, making for the city’s heaviest calendar day of snowfall in records dating back to 1937. An even-higher total of 56 cm (22 in) was recorded in downtown Toronto.
Because Lake Ontario is much deeper than nearby Lake Erie, the great bulk of it typically remains unfrozen throughout much or most of the winter. Frigid winds passing over the relatively warm lake can lead to intense instability and snow bands that can hold steady for hours, dumping massive amounts. However, the large-scale setups that drive such banding are most commonly associated with a westerly or northwesterly wind that pushes the heaviest snow toward the southern (U.S.) side of the lake, from Buffalo to Watertown, New York. According to Yeechian Low, an atmospheric science specialist at AECOM Canada, the easterly wind that would favor the lake effect on the Canadian side of the lake, over the greater Toronto area – as observed with this storm – is not uncommon by itself. But it is usually associated with a large-scale push of warmer air (especially aloft) that confines the instability needed for lake effect to a shallow near-surface layer, preventing massive snow amounts.
In this case, the cold intrusion immediately before the storm was so strong that even with modest warming, the instability over the lake near Toronto extended through a deeper layer than usual, up to roughly a mile above sea level. And that lowest mile of the atmosphere also happened to feature temperatures between about 14 and –4 degrees Fahrenheit (–10 to –20 degrees Celsius) – the ideal range for producing the fluffy, lower-density flakes known as dendrites. These can yield up to 30 inches of snow from every inch of liquid water.
Though the snow further south didn’t smash many records, it was impressively heavy – one to two feet in many areas – from eastern New York across southern New England to Boston.
Especially in and around eastern Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C., area, there was a distinctly different flavor to the wintry precipitation. A warm layer aloft was just enough to allow snow to melt, but the surface air mass was frigid and deep enough to refreeze the melted snow into pellets of sleet. And not just a few pellets: up to four inches of sleet fell on parts of the D.C. area, the most in one storm since 1994, noted Capital Weather Gang on Monday.
They added: “The defining feature of this storm was historic sleet, falling at uncommonly low temperatures. That combination — heavy sleet embedded in deep cold — created a storm that will prove far more disruptive and longer-lasting than a typical snowstorm … And with nighttime temperatures forecast to plunge into the single digits for days, the mass will remain frozen solid well into the week. There is no telling when this glacial-like offering will finally melt.”
Since an inch of sleet can weigh several times more than an inch of snow, this made for intense shoveling. In Arkansas, the weight of the sleet caused multiple roof collapses.
Mid-Atlantic hunkers down for its longest cold stretch in decades in some spots
The atmosphere seems to be in no hurry to give the Eastern U.S. a break from the current cold blast, which stands in stark contrast to the record warmth that swaddled much of the nation from December into early January. Forecast models on Tuesday suggested at least another week before temperatures make a run at closer-to-normal levels. Even beyond that point, reinforcing shots of cold air may continue to plague some parts of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast well into February.
As we noted on Friday, this week may not produce a spectacular number of record lows at specific sites. All-time local record lows for late January and early February extend back to the 1800s in many cases, and few such lows have been notched in the 21st century. Even daily records with a 21st-century vintage are often scant.
- In New York’s Central Park (data going back to 1969), only four out of the 60 dates in January and February have record lows that were set in the year 2000 or later. That compares to 17 out of the 60 record highs in those months.
- In Washington, D.C. (data going back to 1872), only one out of 60 record lows in January and February has been set this century, as opposed to 16 record highs.
- In Miami, the period since 2000 has yielded 27 record highs across the 60 dates in January and February, compared to just five record lows.
It’s sheer duration where this week’s cold blast may really stand out. Washington’s Reagan National Airport dipped below freezing on Friday night, January 23, and as of this writing, the city isn’t predicted to reach freezing again till Monday, February 2. That would result in nine consecutive days below 32°F. Only four such stretches have been recorded in D.C., with the most recent being 36 years ago:
| #1 | 12 days | Jan. 23-Feb. 3, 1936 |
| #2 | 11 days | Jan. 10-20, 1893 |
| #3 | 10 days | Dec. 16-25, 1989 |
| #4 | 9 days | Feb. 4-13, 1895 |
Even more impressive, it’s possible none of those days will even hit 30°F. If so, that will mark the city’s longest stretch stuck in the 20s Fahrenheit or colder in a full 90 years:
| #1 | 11 days | Jan. 10-20, 1893 |
| #2 | 10 days | Jan. 23-Feb. 1, 1936 |
| #3 | 9 days | Feb. 4-13, 1895 |
If Philadelphia stays below freezing for at least 11 days, as now predicted, it’ll be the longest such stretch there since 1979. As for New York’s Central Park, it managed to stay below freezing for 14 consecutive days ending on Jan. 8, 2018. That was the third-longest stretch on record behind 15 and 16 days in 1881 and 1961, respectively. This outbreak is not expected to rival New York’s prolonged freeze of 2018.
At this point, there’s no telling where this year’s full meteorological winter (December through February) will end up for the contiguous United States in terms of season-long average temperature. Even the intense cold over the next week or two will be buffered by the astounding warmth that preceded it, so it’s still possible the three-month period will end up at least near the 1990-2020 average, if not above it. But it’s the intense events that tend to stand out most in our weather recollections – so the current Arctic blast is likely to freeze out memories of holiday warmth for many folks.
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
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