States from New Mexico to New England are under a warning going into Saturday. Temperatures are dropping outside, but social media is heating up with jokes as roughly 140 million people prepare for the winter storm. Even DoorDash joined in, warning the ladies that delivery won’t be possible for all products, so choose your snow buddy wisely! As the jokes keep rolling, so are the updates on the first winter storm of 2026, just 23 days in.
As mentioned, the National Weather Service forecast has promised widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
DoorDash and social media users may be cuttin’ up as we wait for snow to fall, but officials are taking warnings seriously. Some areas are already getting hit, and forget about traveling! More than 12,000 flights were canceled Saturday and Sunday across the U.S., according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. Disruptions were also piling up at airports from Dallas to Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
Churches moved Sunday services online. Mardi Gras parades in Louisiana were canceled or rescheduled. School superintendents in Philadelphia and Houston announced that schools would be closed on Monday. Some universities in the South canceled classes for Monday.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the winter storm ahead. Many have declared emergencies or urged people to stay home. Forecasters say the damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could be like that of a hurricane. By midday Saturday, a quarter of an inch of ice was reported in parts of southeastern Oklahoma, eastern Texas and portions of Louisiana.
“What really makes this storm unique is, just following this storm, it’s just going to get so cold,” said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “The snow and the ice will be very, very slow to melt and won’t be going away anytime soon, and that’s going to hinder any recovery efforts.”
Around 120,000 power outages were reported in the path of the winter storm Saturday afternoon, including about 53,000 in Texas and 45,000 in Louisiana, according to poweroutage.us.
After sweeping through the South, the winter storm was expected to move into the Northeast. It will dump about 1 to 2 feet of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted. Officials in Georgia advised people in the state’s northern regions to get off the roads by sundown Saturday and be prepared to stay put for at least 48 hours.
Will Lanxton, the senior state meteorologist, said Georgia could get “perhaps the biggest ice storm we have expected in more than a decade” followed by unusually cold temperatures.
“Ice is a whole different ballgame than snow,” Lanxton said. “Ice, you can’t do anything with. You can’t drive on it. It’s much more likely to bring down power lines and trees.”
The Midwest saw wind chills as low as -40°F. This means frostbite could set in within 10 minutes. The -36°F reading in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, on Saturday morning was the coldest in almost 30 years.
“I think there are two parts of this storm that make it unique. One is just a broad expanse of spatial coverage of this event … You’ve got 2,000 miles of country that’s being impacted by the storm with snow, sleet, and freezing rain,” said Josh Weiss, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center. “The other part of this storm that’s really impressive is what’s going to happen right afterward. We’re looking at extreme cold, record cold.”
Associated Press writers Thomas Peipert, Jeff Amy, Dave Collins, Mike Schneider, Rio Yamat, Julie Walker, David A. Lieb, George Walker, and Laura Bargfeld contributed to this report via AP Newsroom.
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