A blast of lingering, frigid air across the northern U.S. will keep the snow coming this week from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.
Christmas week will be cold and snowy for much of the northern and higher-elevation areas of the country. Snowfalls of 3-4 feet — the largest of the season so far — are expected for the next few days east of Lakes Erie and Ontario.
On Christmas Day, a stationary, lake-effect snow band off Lake Erie dumped nearly three feet of snow on Erie, Pa., more than four times the previous Christmas record and 14 inches more than the city's all-time record, which has stood for more than 60 years. The snowfall prompted city officials to declare a snow emergency. State police said drivers should avoid travel.
The Weather Channel reported that Erie International Airport recorded an eye-popping 34 inches of snow on Monday — the previous Christmas record, from 2002, was 8.1 inches. The snowfall shattered the city's all-time one-day record of 20 inches, recorded on Nov. 11, 1956.
The snowfall closed the airport as workers pushed to clear runways, Erie News Now reported. Most flights were operating on time by Tuesday.
Snow continued falling on Tuesday, bringing the total since late Christmas Eve to 55 inches in under 36 hours, with more on the way Wednesday, forecasters said — up to a foot more.
Erie's 92 inches of snow this December make this the snowiest single month on record there.The previous record, from December 1989, was 66.9 inches.
Erie averages about 101 inches of snow per year, The Weather Channel noted.
Up to a foot of heavy snow is forecast through Wednesday in northern New England, where strong winds with gusts of up to 65 mph, slowing travel and causing power outages, were predicted for Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Tewksbury, Mass., resident Dwayne Doherty told the Associated Press he welcomed the snow. "I'm actually happy," he said. "We haven't had snow on Christmas at all in the last few years. It's actually perfect."
Another snow system could develop before New Year's that might also bring ice around the Mississippi Valley to the Carolinas. By contrast, much of the South will see rain showers through Thursday as a result of warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.
In the West, low-elevation snow will create hazardous travel conditions in western Washington state and Oregon, the National Weather Service said.
Christmas Day weather caused seven flight cancellations and 235 delays across the U.S. on Monday, mostly in Detroit, Chicago and Boston, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. FlightAware forecast 28 cancellations for Tuesday; eight for Wednesday.
Parts of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming received more than 1 foot of snow.
Still, while it was a white Christmas in some parts of the U.S., so far snowfall in the Midwest has not been especially large for this time of year.
A storm system that swept from Nebraska through Iowa dropped about 2 inches of snow on Chicago on Monday, the weather service said. Chicago's O'Hare International Airport reported just six cancellations and average delays of only 15 minutes on Monday.
In Boston, a JetBlue Airways plane slid off the taxiway at Logan Airport.
JetBlue Flight 50 from Savannah, Ga., briefly skidded when it landed about 7:15 p.m. Monday, authorities said. Firefighters helped passengers off of the plane and they were bused to the terminal. No one was injured, officials said.