Jerry Gerardo Lopez shovels snow in his driveway in Detroit as the blizzard-like conditions set in.
We didn't get far into 2014 before the year's first major snowstorm took aim on parts of the Midwest and Northeast. Based on
our criteria for naming winter storms, The Weather Channel named this system Winter Storm Hercules
.Midwest Impacts
© Weather Channel
The back edge of the snow will pull eastward Thursday through the Ohio Valley, including a swath from eastern Missouri through downstate Illinois, Indiana, southern Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
Meanwhile, as the body of Hercules' snow moves east, heavy lake-effect snow will set up off Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron on Thursday.
The Lake Michigan snow band will likely target the cities of
Milwaukee and
Chicago for a time before swinging into the more conventional northwest Indiana snowbelts. Additional accumulations from the lake effect could push snow totals past the one-foot mark in a rather small area, but that small area could be home to several million people.
© Weather Channel
Otherwise, a narrow swath of six inches or more of snow (including what's already fallen) appears likely across the southern Great Lakes region through Thursday.
Lighter amounts of generally five inches of snow or less are expected from Missouri into Ohio Valley. Accumulations of at least one inch are also possible over parts of Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
Meanwhile, the subtropical branch of the jet stream will start to become active over the Gulf of Mexico with an area of rain expanding along the Gulf Coast. This should help to trigger the development of a coastal low off the Mid-Atlantic coast Thursday, just as the Midwestern system spreads into the Northeast.
