Significant winter storm to impact large portion of the Eastern U.S.
Image credit: NWS
A strong cold front will begin to push across the Eastern U.S. on Friday and Saturday, March 11 and 12, 2022, bringing a wide range of hazards to the region. Heavy snow is expected from the eastern Great Lakes through the Northeast. Meanwhile, thunderstorms capable of damaging wind, isolated hail, and a few tornadoes are possible across parts of the Southeast to the Mid-Atlantic Friday night into Saturday.
More than 150 million people are forecast to see some type of impact as this potent late-winter storm rapidly strengthens along the Eastern Seaboard, bringing heavy rains, snow, ice and strong winds.
“A fast-moving and rapidly strengthening storm will bring intense weather and dramatic weather changes to the eastern half of the nation, with the most extremes in store for the Northeast,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dave Dombek said.1
Snow rates greater than 2.5 cm (1 inch) per hour, combined with gusty winds will produce blowing and drifting snow and severely reduced visibility. This will create difficult to hazardous travel conditions.2
The greatest snow accumulations are likely across portions of the interior Northeast where totals in excess of 20 cm (8 inches) are likely. This could lead to scattered power outages due to the heavy and wet nature of the snowfall.
In the wake of the storm system, much colder air will spread across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic with lows likely below freezing along the Gulf Coast and northern Florida Sunday morning.
References:
1 Powerful storm to bury interior Northeast under heavy snow – AccuWeather
2 NOAA/NWS Weather Prediction Center
Teo Blašković founded The Watchers in 2011 and edited it until 2026, covering seismic and volcanic activity, extreme weather, space weather and near-Earth objects. Articles on this page are his archive.
Published in the last 24 hours
- A crack up to 6 m (20 ft) wide is splitting the summit of the Hochvogel in the Allgäu Alps; 12 years of measurements now put the loose block at about 400,000 cubic metres, half the peak. Epicenter
- Hayli Gubbi in Ethiopia's Afar erupted on 23 November 2025, its first historically documented eruption; a year later scientists have traced it to magma from Erta Ale that travelled more than 30 km underground. Epicenter
- Typhoon Cempaka spun up over the western North Pacific on 7 November 2026; it is now the 32nd typhoon of the year, more than any year this century, one past the 31 counted in 2013. Epicenter
- A school bus driver in Paradise, California, drove 22 children through the 2018 Camp Fire for about five hours, and when the smoke thickened, he and two teachers tore his shirt into wet strips for them to breathe through Epicenter
