Extreme Temperatures
The Weather Channel reports that the Midwestern storm pattern, which passed through Chicago and Milwaukee, will mix with wetter weather coming from New Orleans, Louisville, and even Atlanta. By Thursday night, forecasts predict that the clipper system will travel from the Great Lakes region to the East Coast, passing through cities like Philadelphia, New York, and up towards Boston.
Since the beginning of the winter, over 2 meters of snow has fallen on the Russian capital, the Moscow mayor's aide in housing and public utilities Pyotr Biryukov told Interfax. Snowfall is expected in Moscow for four or five more days, he added.
On Monday, 45,000 community services employees and 15,000 units of equipment were attempting to cope with 26 cm of snow - nearly a fifth of the average annual fall.
The latest snowfall has become a nightmare for drivers with the capital's commuters trapped in gridlock.
Many of those who left their workplace in the evening had to spend five to 10 hours getting home. The average speed of vehicles was no more than 7-9 km/h. The number of road accidents - 3,000 - was much higher than during an ordinary day, with minor accidents quadrupling, according to Channel One TV.
Aside from the Meric-Ipsala road, 37 village roads have also been shut down to traffic due to heavy snowfall in the region.
Road crews are working to open the Meric-Ipsala road to traffic again on Sunday.
Snow thickness at Uludag, one of the favorite skiing centers of Europe, reached 215 centimeters on Sunday.
The Weather Department of the north-western province of Bursa said that they expected snowfall at Uludag on both Sunday and Monday.
Jack Frost continued to bite at Germany's nose on Tuesday, with snow still falling across many parts of Germany on Tuesday, following heavy snowfall on Sunday and Monday, the German Weather Service (DWD) reported.
The service said that 3.5 billion tons of snow fell in the country on Sunday alone. With winter weather continuing, that figure could rise to 6 billion tons by Wednesday.
Winter weather conditions led to frustrating travel conditions across the country. At Frankfurt's airport, Germany's largest, about 543 or 1,190 planned flights were cancelled Monday, according to German news agency DPA. In Munich another 200 flights were grounded. Delays affected air traffic at every German airport as crews de-iced planes and snow-removal equipment was used to clear gates.
Canada was the coldest nation in the world at the start of the day with with temperatures as low as minus 43.1 degrees Celsius (-45.6 Fahrenheit) in the Northwest Territories, according to public broadcaster CBC.
In Ottawa, buildings cracked in the cold, making sounds like the crash of a wrecking ball.
While the physics behind sudden stratospheric warming events are complicated, their implications are not: such events are often harbingers of colder weather in North America and Eurasia. The ongoing event favors colder and possibly stormier weather for as long as four to eight weeks after the event, meaning that after a mild start to the winter, the rest of this month and February could bring the coldest weather of the winter season to parts of the U.S., along with a heightened chance of snow.
This cold era is expected to last for approximately 22 to 33 years with the coldest temperatures to be seen during the 2020's and 2030's either side of the bottom year of the cycle in 2031, and have temperatures on the order of that observed during the Dalton Minimum (1793-1830). We have already seen the early signs of the new climate with record cold winters globally for some of the past four years. During the winter of 2011-2012, while the central and eastern USA experienced a relatively warm winter, Europe and Asia had a difficult winter. We have entered a period of record temperature setting both hot and cold. This trend of highly variable extremes of both hot and cold within a general trend of globally declining temperatures is fully characteristic of the transition between climate changes.
Frankfurt airport, Germany's main air hub, cancelled around 500 departing and arriving flights, representing 40 percent of its daily schedule.
The busiest airport in Europe, London Heathrow, scrapped more than 200 flights.
Heathrow said a decision was taken 24 hours in advance to cancel 130 flights due to predicted poor visibility, but problems elsewhere in Europe were having an impact too.
"The additional cancellations are because a number of airports elsewhere in Europe are experiencing problems so that has a knock-on effect for us," an airport spokesman said.
Heathrow has spent 36 million pounds ($57 million) on upgrading its snow-clearing equipment since 2010, when freezing temperatures and snow almost brought the airport to a halt in the approach to Christmas.
Freezing rain and snow also led to treacherous conditions on railways and roads, triggering numerous accidents.