A snow-covered car sits outside a home Sunday in Greensboro, North Carolina.
A snow-covered car sits outside a home Sunday in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Much of the U.S. Southeast ground to a halt on Sunday as a powerful winter storm swept into the region, dropping an immense amount of snow on a region not usually associated with snowfall measured in feet.

Hundreds of thousands of people were without power by Sunday afternoon across the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia as snow continued to fall. Widespread snow amounts in excess of 12 inches have been reported along the southern Appalachians, with local amounts topping 24 inches. It's not just the mountains seeing dramatic amounts, however. Roughly 6 to 10 inches have also been reported in a swath from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Richmond, Virginia, with accumulations reported as far north as the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C.

25 centimetres of snow might not sound so earth-shattering to winter-savvy Canadians, but, for perspective, many locations in the Carolinas have now seen snowfall equal to, and in many cases greater than, what they normally see in an entire winter season. And it all fell in fewer than 24 hours.


While the core of the storm will more offshore into Monday, officials caution that the impacts may linger for days as crews work to clean up in its wake.

We take a look at a snowstorm that will find its way into the record books, below.