Temperatures in all 50 US states dipped below freezing on Tuesday in a rare nationwide chill that will keep a grip on much of the country for at least another day, with cutting winds and blizzards posing the most danger.

Florida, a state that normally basks in its reputation as a warm winter escape, experienced unusually low temperatures. In the midwest, northeast and eastern Canada, it was dangerous to venture outside. At some point on Tuesday, at least one location in each of the 50 US states recorded temperatures below freezing, with the highest point on Hawaii, Mauna Kea, recording a temperature of 21F (-6C).

The so-called polar vortex that funnelled an Arctic low pressure system into the upper US this week swung south and east on Tuesday. Polar conditions settled over two-thirds of the US.

It was colder in the southern state of Georgia than Alaska as Atlanta plunged to 6F (-14C) - the lowest temperature since 1966 - while Anchorage, Alaska, recorded 27F (-3C) . Wind chills were recorded around -60F in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and New Hampshire.

Temperatures in the single digits were set to arrive early Tuesday, and they can really do a number on your home.

CBS 2's Dave Carlin went in search of some tips on how to protect your house for the bitter blast.

Phyllis Dalton of Levittown was standing right under the spot Monday where several years ago, a water pipe snapped during a cold snap.

She promised herself it would never happen again, and started winterizing.

"You pay attention and you do those little things," Levittown said.

Levittown learned just like people need layers of clothing in the extreme cold, houses also need layers of protection. The advice is particularly important in preventing freezing pipes.

"(There is) a valve - a shut off valve," said Brian Bruce, who operates New York American Water.

Hours before a deep freeze moved in, flights in and out of the New York City area had already been disrupted.

JetBlue halted operations at all three major New York-area airports and in Boston in an effort to catch up with dozens of weather-related delays and cancellations.

The airline announced Monday that operations stopped entirely at Newark, John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports and at Boston's Logan International Airport at 5 p.m.

The plan allows 17 hours for the company to rest crew and time to service aircraft.

As CBS 2′s Tracee Carrasco reported, stranded travelers had nowhere to go and nothing to do Monday but wait and sleep in airport terminals.

JetBlue customer Julia Moron has been desperately trying to get home to Houston for days.

"I've been stuck here between JFK and now LaGuardia since Thursday," she said.

There is no simpler way to put it - we are entering a mini to full blown ice age, and despite the rhetoric, we all have to prepare for it.

I don't care if you are rich or poor. Your skin color matters not, nor your political leanings. We all have to prepare for the obvious and the sooner you do, the quicker your life can begin some sense of normality.

Preparing for an ice age means that you will have to alter your diet to meet available foodstuffs. Planning now is the smartest decision you can make.

The sun, the life giving big ball of gas, is not acting normal. It's acting sluggish. And when it does that, we enter into periods of global cooling. These three articles tell us that the sun is at a low:

• Solar activity drops to 100-year low, puzzling scientists
• Sun Is Weakest In 200 years
• Starvation: Coming to Your Town...Soon

It doesn't matter what some academic aboard a research vessel says - we are getting colder.

The problem has been defined. The solution - not that difficult! It will require work and basic knowledge, but if our ancestors could survive, so can we.

First, your diet needs to change. A meatless diet simply will not work, as the body needs cholesterol in order to make the necessary hormones like adrenaline, testosterone, and estrogen. As the mercury drops to sub-normal temperature, cholesterol will be used by the body because of increased activity to stay warm. The shiver reflex helps raise the body's temperature, the testosterone will increase body hair to help stay warm, and estrogen will help thermoregulate a woman's body.

Hundreds of Amtrak passengers who spent the night onboard three trains stranded in snow in northern Illinois have begun to arrive in Chicago, rail line officials said Tuesday morning.


About 300 passengers on two trains that were stuck near Mendota, about 80 miles from Chicago, boarded buses in Princeton for the final leg of their trip, said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. They began arriving in downtown Chicago around 7 a.m. Tuesday and more were expected to arrive throughout the morning.

A third train loaded with 217 people spent the night at a BNSF rail yard in Galesburg; they were taking buses for the final 150 miles to Chicago.

The trains - The Southwest Chief from Los Angeles, the Illinois Zephyr from Quincy and the California Zephyr from the San Francisco Bay area - got stuck after 3 p.m. Monday in blowing, drifting snow and ice that Magliari said made the tracks impassable.

© Rob Donnelly

A cold snap is setting record low temperatures across the United States. Yes, it's very cold. But wind chill is not a useful way to describe the weather, as Daniel Engber explained in 2007. The original article is below.

If the weather makes headlines only when it's horrendous out, wind chill is its PR agent. This week, when temperatures in New York City dropped to single digits, newspapers and TV meteorologists breathlessly reported that the wind chill had hit minus 11. In Ohio, they told us, the thermometers read close to zero, but gusts of cold air made it feel like 25 below. Banner stories proclaimed a wind chill of 35 below in Chicago.

The weathermen trot out these arctic, pumped-down numbers to put an exclamation point on the banality of winter. Wind chill readings make excitement out of mere inconvenience; they imbue a miserable day with the air of epic calamity. A temperature of 5 degrees is unpleasant. A wind chill of 20 below - well, that's something to talk about.

The coldest, most dangerous blast of polar air in decades gripped the country on Tuesday, Jan. 7, closing schools and day care centers, grounding flights and forcing people to pull their hoods and scarves tight to protect exposed skin from nearly instant frostbite.

On this record breaking cold day, New Yorkers described the weather as "brutal." Dr. Jeffrey Rabrich at St. Luke's Hospital told Fox 5 that he has seen patients come in with frost bite. He said if you're not wearing gloves or a hat, frostbite can set in within minutes.

Central Park broke a 118-year-old record for Jan. 7 when the temperature dropped to 4 degrees. Strong winds pushed the wind chill well below zero. Central Park had a record low temp of 6° since 1896. The Tuesday temperature was 50 degrees lower than was recorded on Monday.

Following the worst fog of the last eight years, Delhi government on Monday announced leave for all schools here from January 07 to 11.

Due to fall in the temperature and dense fog today morning, air, road and rail traffic in the national capital was badly effected.

Fog and cold wave hit normal life here as the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGI) airport was forced to shut down partially for around three hours early today after extremely poor visibility on the runway.

It's polar bear weather today for much of the Midwest. Temperatures are in the -20sº F (-28º C) and -30sº F (-35º C) in eastern Montana, North Dakota, northeast South Dakota, Minnesota and northern Iowa. With the stiff wind, it's even worse - wind chills in the -40sº F (-40º C) and -50sº F (-45º C) are common across Minnesota and North Dakota, cold enough for exposed skin to suffer frostbite in just five minutes. By tonight, the freeze will reach the East Coast, where temperatures from Florida to Maine are expected to be 30º F to 40º F (16º C to 22º C) degrees below normal, extremes that haven't been seen in decades. The National Weather Service isn't kidding when it calls the cold "life-threatening."

Unsurprisingly, the extreme cold has brought out the climate change skeptics, who point to the freeze and the recent snowstorms and say, essentially, "nyah-nyah." Now this is where I would usually point to the fact that the occasional cold snap - even one as extreme as much of the U.S. is experiencing now - doesn't change the overall trajectory of a warming planet. Weather is what happens in the atmosphere day to day; climate is how the atmosphere behaves over long periods of time. Winters in the U.S. have been warming steadily over the past century, and even faster in recent decades, so it would take more than a few sub-zero days to cancel that out.

But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely. Right now much of the U.S. is in the grip of a polar vortex, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a whirlwind of extremely cold, extremely dense air that forms near the poles. Usually the fast winds in the vortex - which can top 100 mph (161 k/h) - keep that cold air locked up in the Arctic. But when the winds weaken, the vortex can begin to wobble like a drunk on his fourth martini, and the Arctic air can escape and spill southward, bringing Arctic weather with it. In this case, nearly the entire polar vortex has tumbled southward, leading to record-breaking cold, as you can see in this weatherbell.com graphic:

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere - from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.