Coldest air of the season, snow to hit parts of the Northeast
ABC News
(NEW YORK) — Before temperatures get warmer in the East next week, brutal cold is expected this weekend — the coldest of the season, so far, for parts of the Northeast.
Some of the coldest areas will also see accumulating snow to usher in the arctic blast.
On Friday morning, a quick snow shower will move through Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, blanketing the states in a dusting to 2 inches of snow.
Friday afternoon, snow will fall from eastern Kentucky through western Pennsylvania.
On Friday evening, scattered snow will be across Appalachia, from the Smoky Mountains to upstate New York. Up to 2 inches of snow is possible for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
On Saturday, snow will fall over New England — mainly for all areas north of New York City — though some flurries or light snow may reach the city, leading to a dusting to an inch of snow there. Boston could see an inch or two of snow.
Higher snow totals are expected in New England, where 2 to 4 inches are possible for the eastern I-90 corridor, including Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie to near Cleveland.
This low to moderate impact winter storm will usher in another cold blast along with very windy conditions leading to brutal wind chills across the region.
These same areas seeing the most snow will also be under strong wind gusts, with wind chills plummeting to 30 below zero. An extreme cold watch is in place from Friday night through Sunday morning.
In parts of northeastern New York, such as Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, wind chills could drop to -35 degrees, which would cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.
High temperatures in New York City will only reach the 20s on Saturday and the teens on Sunday. The lows will drop into the single digits for Sunday morning. Wind chills during the daytime this weekend will be mainly at or below zero due to gusts up to 50 mph on Saturday and gusts up to 30 mph on Sunday. Sunday morning wind chills could reach -15 in the city.
Boston and Buffalo, New York, could feel like the negative teens on Sunday morning and the negative single digits on Monday morning.
Next week, a slow pattern change is expected, with average to even above average temperatures possible for the East by the middle and end of next week. It will still be chilly, but given the brutal cold we have all been enduring, it might feel downright balmy.
Former FBI Director James Comey talks backstage on June 19, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. Carsten Koall/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — As the Justice Department’s criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey looks increasingly imperiled, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan and other DOJ officials are leveling unusual public attacks at the judge overseeing the case by mischaracterizing comments he made at a Wednesday hearing.
“Personal attacks — like Judge Nachmanoff referring to me as a ‘puppet’ — don’t change the facts or the law,” Halligan said in an statement exclusively to the New York Post.
“A federal judge should be neutral and impartial. Instead, this judge launched an outrageous and unprofessional personal attack yesterday in open court against US Attorney Lindsey Halligan. DOJ will continue to follow the facts and the law,” DOJ spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said in a statement posted to ‘X’ Thursday.
The statements refer to an exchange between U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff and Comey’s attorney Michael Dreeben in which Nachmanoff questioned whether their position was that Halligan was serving as a “puppet” or a “stalking horse” for President Donald Trump in his orders for retribution against Comey.
But Nachmanoff never asserted directly that Halligan was a “puppet,” and didn’t dispute in court when DOJ attorney Tyler Lemons flatly rejected that characterization.
“So your view is that Ms. Halligan is a stalking horse or a puppet, for want of a better word, doing the president’s bidding?” Judge Nachmanoff asked Dreeben during the exchange.
“Well, I don’t want to use language about Ms. Halligan that suggests anything other than she did what she was told to do,” Dreeben replied. “The president of the United States has the authority to direct prosecutions. She worked in the White House. She was surely aware of the president’s directive.”
Comey was indicted in September on charges of lying to Congress after Trump forced out previous U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert and installed Halligan, a White House staffer with no prosecutorial experience, then called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to act “NOW!!!” to prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Rep. Adam Schiff. Comey has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
An attorney for Comey argued during Wednesday’s hearing that by replacing Siebert with his former staffer and lawyer, and publicly calling for his political foes to be charged, Trump was “manipulating the machinery of prosecution” and committing an “egregious violation of bedrock constitutional values.”
Halligan also testified that the grand jury that indicted Comey voted to indict him on two of the three counts submitted in the original indictment, but that the final revised indictment reflecting the two counts Comey was ultimately charged with was not reviewed by the full grand jury — only by the jury foreperson and one other grand juror.
Signage outside Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is caked in snow after a blizzard struck overnight on November 27, 2019 in Bloomington, Minnesota. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
(MINNEAPOLIS) — A 47-year-old man was struck and killed by a snowplow at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, according to local officials.
The incident was reported shortly after 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at a parking lot near Terminal 2, according to Jeff Lea, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which operates the airport.
That parking lot serves the in-flight catering services company LSG Sky Chefs.
Temperatures were in the upper 20s with light snow falling in the area at the time of the incident. Over 200 flights out of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport were delayed on Tuesday.
The victim’s identity was not immediately released.
The Minnesota State Patrol is helping with the investigation, Lea said.
The city of Minneapolis on Wednesday declared a snow emergency starting at 9 p.m., which bans certain street parking.
“These rules help plows in clearing the streets so emergency vehicles and other traffic can get around,” city officials said.
Boats descend lower into a desert canyon at Antelope Point Marina, requiring construction of alternative boat ramps, as Lake Powell continues to shrink on September 3, 2022, near Page, Arizona. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — It has been a tale of two winters on the opposing U.S. coasts this season.
While the East has been slammed with frigid temperatures and punishing winter storms, the West is experiencing a snow drought amid warmer-than-normal temperatures.
Prolonged drought across much of the West has been worsened this winter by below‑average snowfall and persistent warmth, fueling a widespread and intensifying snow drought. With sharply reduced mountain snowpack, the region’s water supplies and winter tourism are facing mounting challenges, experts told ABC News.
“This winter, we’ve just had an extreme lack of storm activity, and the storms that we have had have either brought very small amounts of snowfall or have brought rain,” Jon Meyer, assistant Utah state climatologist, told ABC News.
Warm temperatures have prevented snow from accumulating
Much of the western United States entered winter already grappling with a lack of rain. Widespread moderate to severe drought conditions stretched from New Mexico to Washington, including much of the Colorado River Basin, leaving soil moisture low and reservoir levels depleted heading into the season.
More than one-third of the West is currently facing some form of drought condition, with much of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico experiencing a moderate drought or worse, according to the U.S. Drought Mitigation Center’s U.S. Drought Monitor.
Utah is facing the worst drought conditions among western states, with more than 94% of the state experiencing what the USDM categorizes as a Moderate Drought and more than 40% of the state experiencing Severe Drought.
Salt Lake City has only received a tenth of an inch of snow so far this season – the lowest to date since records began in 1874, according to the National Weather Service. Their lowest seasonal snowfall was 14.3 inches during the winter of 1933-34. By comparison, parts of the Southeast, which typically don’t see much snowfall, have seen more snow than Salt Lake City this season.
“Just totally uncharted territory for the amount of low-elevation and mid-elevation snowfall Utah has seen, and that’s a pattern that’s played out across much of the Western U.S.,” Meyer said.
While many western states received average or above-average precipitation in the fall and early winter, warmer temperatures caused much of it to fall as rain rather than snow, leading to unusually low snowpack and a rapidly developing snow drought.
“If you look at most of the West, it’s at or above average, with regards to precipitation to date,” Eric Sproles, an associate professor of earth sciences at Montana State University, told ABC News. “But if you look at the the amount of water that’s stored in the snow pack is, it’s pretty bleak.”
Meteorological winter, which begins in the U.S. on December 1, kicked off with record warmth across much of the West. December 2025 was the warmest December on record for cities including Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Portland, Oregon and Boise, Idaho, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Nine western states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming – recorded their warmest December on record. For the winter season to date, Colorado is currently experiencing its warmest winter since 1934, while Utah is experiencing its warmest winter on record, according to NOAA.
The snow drought is threatening water supplies
Drought on its own already stresses water supplies, agriculture and ecosystems. But when winter fails to deliver significant mountain snow, the resulting snow drought – a period of abnormally little snowpack for the time of year – can intensify those impacts, according to NOAA.
The snowpack typically acts as a natural water reservoir. However, without an adequate snowpack to slowly release water through the spring and summer snow melt, rivers run lower, soils dry out earlier, and drought conditions can deepen and linger.
Melting snow provides a slow release of the water into reservoirs and dams but also recharges ground water as well, Sproles said: “That slow, steady release is important. The snowpack is kind of like a savings account.”
In Utah, the snow water equivalent – meaning how much water is in the snowpack – is currently at only 55% of its median, which is the lowest snow water equivalent to date. Moreover, only a quarter of the state has seen a ground snow cover depth of at least 1 inch.
Colorado and Oregon are also reporting their lowest snow water equivalents to date, with Montana approaching its lowest snow water equivalent to date.
In much of the West, snowmelt provides a large percentage of the water used by communities, agriculture, and ecosystems; in some states, up to about 75 percent of the water supply can come from melting snow, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. As such, the snow water equivalent is a vital measure of the region’s water resources.
According to NOAA, a persistent snow drought can trigger a cascade of hydrologic changes. Low snowpack and early snowmelt can affect vegetation, reduce surface and subsurface water storage and alter streamflow, all of which directly impact water management and planning across the West.
While soil moisture in not currently a concern, it could dry out over the next couple of months, according to Meyer.
“We’ve become critically reliant on soil moisture observations for drought monitoring and predictions,” Meyer said.
The reservoirs along the Colorado River are especially threatened, the experts said. Major reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin remain well below average, according to latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). As of early February, Lake Powell, in southern Utah and northern Arizona, was about 26 % full, while Lake Mead – the nation’s largest reservoir by volume, located in Arizona and Nevada – was about 34% full.
Total storage in the Colorado River system, which provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven western states, was roughly 37% of capacity, down from about 42% at the same time last year, according to the USBR, which has flagged 13 reservoirs, the majority located in the West, for having the lowest observed water storage levels for the current time period.
The Colorado River system also serves as a vital resource for 30 tribal nations, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species, the USBR said.
Winter sports have been impacted by lack of snow
The snow drought is also impacting local economies that rely on winter sports, an industry that contributes $20 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to The Climate Reality Project.
“The resort winter tourism is a huge economic backbone for many of these mountain resort communities,” Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president for climate change for the World Wildlife Fund, told ABC News. “And so as they lose their snowfall, they also lose these revenue.”
Vail Resorts, a Colorado-based company that owns and operates some of the largest ski resorts in North America, reported in January that skier visits to its North American resorts were down about 20% through Jan. 4, compared to the same period last year. The company issued the update as a mid-season report on skier visits and revenue, citing a lack of early-season snowfall as a major factor in the decline.
Season-to-date total lift revenue, including an allocated portion of season pass revenue, was down 1.8% from the same period last year, said the tourism company, which operates dozens of resorts across North America, including Vail Mountain and Breckenridge in Colorado and Park City Mountain in Utah.
“We experienced one of the worst early season snowfalls in the western U.S. in over 30 years, which limited our ability to open terrain and negatively impacted visitation and ancillary spending for both local and destination guests during the period,” Chief Executive Officer Rob Katz said in a statement.
Vail’s Tahoe-area resorts in California also had a slow start through mid-December, but holiday-period snowstorms allowed the company to open more terrain, Katz said.
February and March typically can bring significant amounts of snow to the region, and odds favor above-average precipitation for much of the region over the next few weeks, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, with persistent unusually warm conditions less likely. However, NOAA notes, snowfall in the coming months may not be able to make up for existing deficits.
Forecasters further caution that this pattern may not last for the rest of the month, with overall warmer and drier-than-average conditions still favored for the month as a whole.
