Record-breaking cold clobbers two-thirds of the US

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Two-thirds of the continental United States will be a frozen ice box Tuesday, as the so-called polar vortex of frigid arctic air spins across the US Midwest, clips the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley and pushes on into New England. And the sub-zero cold and bitter winds will stick around for a couple of days, possibly bringing dozens of record lows with a life-threatening freeze before dissipating by the weekend, the National Weather Service reported (NWS).

The polar vortex is a mass of freezing air that normally spins around the North Pole, but has slipped southward and swirled into the United States, forecasters said. The hardest-hit area will be the Midwest, where wind chill could bring temperatures as low as -50 F (-46C) in the Chicago area by Tuesday evening, the NWS reported. One-to-two feet of snow was forecast in Wisconsin, and six inches in Illinois. Even Alabama and Mississippi could see snow, the service added. “This arctic air dumps out of Canada and will affect us for days,” said Richard Bann, a forecaster with the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park Maryland. (RTRS)

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