“Heavy snow”, “catastrophic ice accumulations” and “freezing temperatures”: the American weather services warn on Friday of the arrival of a “major winter storm”, which should cause serious disruptions to transport and the electricity network in a large part of the United States.
The storm, which is expected to sweep across the central Great Plains starting Friday evening and move through Monday toward metropolises on the East Coast, is expected to produce considerable amounts of snow, as well as sleet and freezing rain.
It risks causing “hazardous driving conditions, power outages, and tree damage,” the National Weather Service (NWS) predicts in its latest bulletin, Friday at 2:37 p.m. (7:37 p.m. GMT).
For meteorologist Ryan Maue, “the next 10 days of winter will be the worst in 40 years across the United States.”
“Think about where you can go, what you can do, and who needs more help to survive the week ahead. This is not an exaggeration or a joke,” said the expert on X.
In Texas, many remember the winter storm of 2021, when a widespread outage on the southern state’s power grid left millions of homes without power and left more than 200 dead.
“This time, I have a generator, and I’m ready,” Clinton Moore, interviewed near Houston, told AFP. “I don’t think it will be worse than five years ago. It can’t be.”
Ice buildup
The local authorities wanted to be reassuring.
The state’s power grid “has never been more robust, never more prepared, and is completely capable of holding up in the face of this winter storm,” Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday, saying he “in no way” expected power outages from the grid itself.
However, conditions could be more dangerous in the northeastern United States, where “ice accumulation is a big risk” for trees, whose branches can fall on power lines.
Nearly 2,400 flights scheduled for Saturday have already been canceled across the country, including more than 1,300 with origin or destination in Dallas, Texas, according to the specialist site FlightAware.
Polar vortex
Across the country, local authorities encouraged residents to stockpile food and medicine and photos on social media showed empty supermarket shelves.
Police in Greensboro, North Carolina, advised people to be judicious about who to ride out the storm with.
“Remember, whoever you spend your Saturday with, you’ll be stuck with them at least until Tuesday, when the ice melts,” she said on X.
In the meantime, Donald Trump took advantage of the weather to once again express his skepticism about the existence of climate change.
“Record cold snap expected to hit 40 states. Rarely seen anything like this before. Could the environmental insurrectionists please explain to me: WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING? », Wrote the American president on his Truth social platform.
The relationship between climate change and winter storms of this type, when Arctic air usually confined to the North Pole (polar vortex) escapes towards the North American continent, is one of the hottest climate issues of the moment.
Researchers note that disruptions in the polar vortex, which send these Arctic air masses towards the United States, have become more frequent over the past 20 years. This could be due to the relatively rapid warming of the Arctic, which is weakening the wind belt usually isolating the atmosphere over the Arctic from North America.
But scientists are waiting to have more data, over a longer period, to firmly establish a link between these extreme winter storms and climate change.
