Over the last four days, a winter storm of genuinely historic proportions carved a 2,300-mile path across the continental United States. At its peak on Sunday, the precipitation shield stretched from the Four Corners region to Maine. More than 230 million Americans were under weather alerts simultaneously. That's the highest number of counties under alerts ever recorded.
Twenty-four governors declared states of emergency. Twenty-one people are confirmed dead across fourteen states. More than 19,000 flights were canceled, making Sunday one of the worst days for air travel disruptions since the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a million customers lost power at peak, and as of this morning, more than 847,000 are still in the dark with temperatures in the single digits.
This is what happened.
The Setup Verified
The overall pattern played out almost exactly as we'd been tracking since mid-January. A cold-core low developed in the Pacific on January 22 and moved southeast toward Baja California. That system interacted with a stretched polar vortex that had displaced unusually far south, pulling Arctic air deep into the central United States. Gulf moisture overran the cold dome at the surface, producing the classic overrunning setup we'd been watching for.
What exceeded expectations was the magnitude of impacts in specific areas. The ice was catastrophic across Mississippi and Tennessee. The snow totals in New England blew past even the upgraded forecasts. And the human toll has been devastating.
Let me walk through the regions.
Mississippi: Catastrophic Damage
I need to be direct about what happened in Mississippi. This was the worst ice storm to hit the state since 1994. Governor Tate Reeves said it himself: "We haven't seen a storm of this magnitude, in terms of ice, since 1994." After that 1994 storm, some locals remembered being without power for weeks.
History may be repeating itself.
An inch of ice accumulation was reported in both Belzoni and Rolling Fork in the Mississippi Delta. An inch of ice is catastrophic.
Tippah Electric Power described the damage as "catastrophic" and warned customers it could be "weeks instead of days" to restore everyone. Not days. Weeks.
In Oxford, conditions became so dangerous overnight that utility crews had to pull off the road entirely. Trees were actively snapping and falling around them. Life-threatening conditions forced linemen to stop working and wait for daylight.
In Corinth, a tree fell through a mobile home on County Road 415. No injuries were reported, but that's the kind of damage that happens when an inch of ice accumulates on trees that aren't built to handle it.
Over 150,000 homes and businesses were without power late Sunday afternoon. Forty-seven counties were affected by the storm. Thirty-seven of those counties were covered in ice.
The Delta and northern Mississippi took the worst of it. These are rural areas where the power infrastructure is already stretched thin. Repairs will be slow. The cold isn't going anywhere. And people are going to be without heat for a long time.
Tennessee: 48 Percent of Nashville in the Dark
Middle Tennessee saw up to three-quarters of an inch of ice accumulation by Sunday afternoon. That doesn't sound as dramatic as an inch, but the impacts were devastating.
At peak on Sunday, Nashville Electric Service reported that 48 percent of all customers were without power. Nearly half the city. As of Monday morning, more than 173,000 customers remained in the dark with over 3,900 active outage events across Davidson County alone.
Eighty-five percent of those outages were vegetation-related. Trees and branches, weighed down by ice, snapping and taking power lines with them.
People across Nashville reported hearing loud cracking noises throughout the night as trees came down. Some described what looked like lightning but was actually transformers blowing out or power lines arcing as they failed.
The infrastructure damage extends beyond the power grid. Cellular service has been reduced in some areas due to power loss and ice damage to communications infrastructure. Multiple interstates were blocked or impacted, including I-65 in Giles County and I-24 West in Rutherford County.
Three weather-related deaths have been confirmed in Tennessee, including a driver who died in a single-vehicle crash in Dyersburg. Eighteen others were injured in more than 160 weather-related crashes across the state.
Governor Bill Lee announced state offices would be closed through Tuesday. One hundred and one warming centers have opened statewide. Approximately 160 linemen are working on downed poles, with another 150 mobilizing to Nashville.
Nashville Electric Service warned outages could last days or longer. And with wind chills dropping as low as 15 below zero across parts of the region, the danger for those without power is severe.
Why Sleet Saved the Carolina
We flagged the Carolinas for significant icing. The setup looked textbook for freezing rain. Instead, most of it fell as sleet.
Quick explanation: both freezing rain and sleet start the same way, falling through a warm layer aloft into cold air near the surface. The difference is how deep that cold air is. Shallow cold layer means the precipitation hits the ground still liquid and freezes on contact. That's freezing rain. That's what kills power grids. Deeper cold layer means it refreezes into ice pellets on the way down. That's sleet. Sleet makes roads terrible but bounces off trees and power lines instead of coating them.
A Greensboro sounding on Sunday showed a 39-degree temperature swing in less than a thousand feet of elevation. The warm nose was there. But the cold air at the surface was deep enough that precipitation refroze before it landed.
Charlotte ended up with mostly sleet. Roads were bad. Power grid held. Nashville got three-quarters of an inch of ice and lost half its electricity. The difference came down to a few hundred feet of cold air depth varying over short distances.
Greenville-Spartanburg and the northeast Georgia mountains did see significant ice, three-quarters of an inch or more. But the Charlotte metro and most of the Piedmont avoided the worst.
The Carolinas got lucky. Mississippi and Tennessee did not.
The Snow Delivered
While the ice story dominated the Deep South, the snow totals verified impressively from the Southern Plains through New England. Multiple locations set daily or all-time records that had stood for decades.
Bonito Lake, New Mexico recorded 31 inches. That's the highest verified total from the entire event, tucked away in the mountains of southern New Mexico where the initial energy was still getting organized.
Crested Butte, Colorado hit 23 inches.
But the real story is what happened from Pennsylvania through New England.
New Bethlehem, Pennsylvania recorded 23 inches. That's the highest total east of the Rockies.
Sterling, Massachusetts hit 22.2 inches. West Shokan, New York recorded 22 inches. Sigel, Pennsylvania hit 22 inches.
Toronto recorded 22 inches, their largest single-day snowfall since 1937. The city activated its major snow response plan. Over 560 flights were canceled at Pearson Airport by 3 PM.
Stratham, New Hampshire hit 21 inches.
At least nineteen locations from Pennsylvania through New England recorded 20 inches or more:
Milton, Massachusetts: 20 inches
Newburyport, Massachusetts: 20 inches
Holden, Massachusetts: 20 inches
Middleton, Massachusetts: 20.5 inches
Peabody, Massachusetts: 20.5 inches
Seabrook, New Hampshire: 20 inches
Shanor-Northvue, Pennsylvania: 20 inches
Clintonville, Pennsylvania: 20 inches
West Mayfield, Pennsylvania: 20 inches
Rowland, Pennsylvania: 20 inches
South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: 20 inches
The 15 to 20 inch range was widespread across southern New England. Salem, New Hampshire recorded 19.8 inches. Coventry, Connecticut hit 18.2 inches. New City, New York recorded 17.6 inches. Branchville, New Jersey hit 17 inches. Providence recorded 16.7 inches. Boston Logan officially recorded 16.7 inches.
Records Broken
Columbus, Ohio: 11.6 inches. Broke the 1988 record.
Little Rock, Arkansas: 6.7 inches. Broke a record that had stood since 1899. That's 127 years. The Little Rock metro area saw up to 11 inches in some locations.
Kansas City, Missouri: 5.2 inches. Broke the 1956 record.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 8.5 inches. Broke the 1948 record.
Toronto, Canada: 22 inches. Largest single-day snowfall since 1937.
The National Weather Service said central and eastern Kentucky could see their most snow in 10 years, and that appears to have verified. Lexington's storm will likely rank among the top 10 since 1887.
Regional Totals
Southern Plains: Sayre, Oklahoma recorded 14 inches. Fredericktown, Missouri hit 14.5 inches. Johnston City, Illinois recorded 14 inches. Tulsa hit 8.7 inches. St. Louis recorded 8.2 inches.
Ohio Valley: Columbus, Ohio hit 11.6 inches. Columbus, Indiana recorded 14.5 inches. Indianapolis recorded 11.1 inches at the airport. Cincinnati hit 10.2 inches. Pittsburgh recorded 11.2 inches. Zanesville, Ohio recorded 16.9 inches. Davis, West Virginia hit 16.6 inches.
Mid-Atlantic: Baltimore BWI recorded 11.3 inches. Central Park in New York City hit 11.4 inches. Philadelphia recorded 9.3 inches at the airport. Washington Dulles hit 7.8 inches. Reagan National recorded 6.9 inches.
New England: The upgraded forecasts verified. NWS Boston had called for 12 to 18 inches with 70 to 80 percent confidence. They nailed it.
The Cold Is the Story Now
As the snow ended Monday morning, nearly 270 million people across the central and eastern United States were under alerts for dangerously cold temperatures. Approximately 90 million people remain under extreme cold watches or warnings right now.
An extreme cold warning remains in effect until noon Tuesday across parts of Mississippi, West Tennessee, and East Arkansas. Wind chills as low as 15 below zero.
Wind chill reports from Monday morning: Dallas hit minus 3. Little Rock dropped to zero. Nashville fell to 2 degrees. Austin recorded 7 degrees.
Flint, Michigan dropped to minus 24, approaching their all-time record low. Grand Rapids hit minus 19.
The forecast for Tuesday is brutal. Pittsburgh could see wind chills of minus 18. Washington, D.C. could hit minus 4. Boston could see minus 3.
Dallas, New Orleans, and Austin may hit record low temperatures. Temperatures aren't expected to rise above freezing north of the Mason-Dixon line through late week.
For the 847,000 people still without power, this cold is life-threatening. You cannot shelter in place in an unheated home when wind chills are in the single digits and below zero. Nashville Electric Service warned outages could last days or longer. The frigid temperatures will slow melting and complicate recovery efforts.
Some Unfortunate News...
Twenty-one confirmed fatalities across fourteen states.
New York lost five people. Texas lost three. Louisiana lost two. Tennessee lost three. Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia each lost one.
Hypothermia took lives in Louisiana and Texas. Two people died from exposure in Caddo Parish near Shreveport. One victim was found at an abandoned gas station in Austin. A 19-year-old college student died in Ann Arbor after going missing without a coat.
Vehicle crashes claimed lives across the region. A driver died in a single-vehicle crash in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Crash fatalities were reported in Iowa and Virginia.
Sledding accidents killed two teenagers. A 16-year-old girl in Frisco, Texas died when she and another girl were being pulled on a sled by a car. The sled struck a curb and then hit a tree. A 17-year-old boy in Arkansas died after being pulled by an ATV in the snow and striking a tree.
These numbers will rise. With more than 800,000 people still without power in subfreezing temperatures, and extreme cold persisting for days, the danger is not over.
What We Got Right
The forecast process worked.
The signal emerged more than a week out. Confidence built steadily. The geographic extent, timing, precipitation types, and magnitude of impacts all verified within the range we'd been communicating.
The ice threat messaging was appropriate. I told you this was the story for millions of people from Texas through the Carolinas. The National Weather Service used words like "crippling." That language was warranted.
The cold air messaging was accurate. I emphasized that power outages in the icing zone would become life-threatening. That's exactly the situation hundreds of thousands of people face right now.
The transition zone uncertainty played out as expected. The difference between catastrophic ice and mostly sleet came down to localized variations in the thermal profile, exactly as expected.
A Note on the Snow That Didn't Show
I've seen the complaints. People in the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Ohio Valley are frustrated. Some models were printing 18 to 24 inches for areas that ended up with 8. Social media had people planning snow days and stocking up for a blizzard that, for them, never materialized.
I get it. It's disappointing. You psyched yourself up for two feet and got ten inches. That feels like a bust even when ten inches is still a lot of snow.
Here's the rule: don't get emotionally invested in model output until you're inside 48 hours. Before that, you're watching trends. You're looking for signals. You're not planning your week around a specific number.
The models did their job this time. They told us a major winter storm was coming. They told us roughly where. They told us ice was going to be a huge problem in the South. All of that verified. What they couldn't nail down until much closer to the event was exactly where the 20-inch line would set up versus the 10-inch line. That's not a model failure. That's just how this works.
If you got less than you expected, you still got a winter storm. If you're upset about it, I'd gently suggest recalibrating how you consume forecast information.
About That Kentucky Forecast Challenge
We came in second in the KSR Weather Challenge, which means $5,000 goes to Rubicon USA. We'll take it.
Our Lexington forecast was 7.9 inches. Actual: 3.7 inches. Our Louisville forecast was 13.7 inches. Actual: 5.9 inches.
We knew the warm nose was going to be thicker west of the Appalachians. That's why we went lower on Lexington than most of the field while others were calling for 10, 12, 14 inches there. That part of the thinking was right. Lexington got cut down hard by the thermal profile, and we were the closest to reality on that side.
But we didn't trust our own logic enough to apply it to Louisville too. We should have. The same warm nose that wrecked Lexington's snow totals did the same thing further west. Louisville ended up with under 6 inches while locations 50 to 60 miles north were measuring 12 plus.
We had the right read on the pattern. We just didn't follow through on it. Should have gone with our gut and doubled down.
T.G. Shuck from WTVQ took first place with 10.4 for Lexington and 11.1 for Louisville. Congrats to him and the Lexington Humane Society for the $10,000.
What's Next
Snow continues falling this morning in northern New England with up to half a foot more possible through Tuesday.
Ninety million people remain under extreme cold watches or warnings. Power restoration will be slow. Some areas may be without power for weeks.
The death toll will unfortunately continue to rise.
Check on your neighbors. Especially the elderly. Especially those without resources to stay warm. This is the part of the storm that kills people in the days after the snow stops falling.
