Snow has become the 'in' weather word by Penny Tranter
Snow has been an ‘in’ word in the Northern Hemisphere for the last few weeks. You might think it’s not really surprising as it is winter, but recently we have had some severe winter conditions due to snow.
And again today snow is our big story. We have had major snowstorms in the northeast USA and central Europe, an unusual occurrence in northwest Pakistan, as well as our own home grown snow.
The northeast USA has been hit by one of the worst blizzards in the last 100 years. The major winter storm started in the Midwest on Friday, dumping around 30cm in Detroit, before moving east and gave up to a metre in some parts of Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Washington. High winds blowing very cold Arctic air whipped the snow up into a frenzy causing widespread blizzard and bone chilling conditions.
As you can imagine this had a huge effect on travel, with major disruption on the roads, railways and in the air. Lots of roads were affected or closed, with trains running on a reduced schedule and the airports in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Washington had hundreds of flights cancelled, with other smaller airports similarly affected. The storm is expected to give equally horrendous conditions over the far east of Canada during today.
In northern Pakistan it has been unusually snowy in recent days, including Islamabad, where snow fell on nearby hills for the first time in six years.
Heavy snowfalls over central Europe, especially in the Alps, led to World Cup skiing events being postponed over the weekend. Avalanches also occurred in Austria sweeping several skiers to their deaths. This bad weather is now pushing into the Mediterranean and is set to bring very stormy and wet conditions to many areas here in the next few days.
In the UK, further snow showers are expected to fall over parts of eastern England through until Tuesday lunchtime. A few centimetres are likely over the high ground, for example, the Yorkshire Dales and Lincolnshire Wolds, which will result in tricky travelling conditions. Although it has to be said, it will be nothing like the snow in the northeast USA.
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