Frigid weather that paralysed a large swath of the United States this week and caused at least 21 deaths began easing on Friday as an Arctic air mass pulled away, setting the stage for a warmer weekend in the midwest and the northeast.
Temperatures from southern New England to the upper midwest should reach up to 10 degrees Celsius through the weekend and Monday, forecasters said, after a record-breaking cold snap that stopped mail deliveries in some parts of the midwest and shuttered schools and businesses.
In Chicago, which experienced temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius earlier this week, temperatures of minus 7 on Friday morning felt positively balmy as a measure of normalcy returned to the nation's third-largest city.
“It feels like summer,” said Dolores Marek (57) as she got off her commuter train in Chicago wearing a long parka coat as set out on the 2.4km walk to the local college where she works. “This is much better than it was.”
Meteorologists linked the spell of brutal cold to the so-called polar vortex, a cap of icy air that usually swirls over the North Pole. Changing air currents caused it to slip down through Canada and into the US midwest this week.
Bryan Jackson, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the core of the vortex was pulling north into eastern Canada, though residual icy air was still pushing over to the US northeast.
The Washington DC area, which had minus 7 temperatures, was under a winter weather advisory until Friday afternoon as about 2.5 cm of snowfall accumulated during the morning.
“That cold air that was over the Great Lakes, over the midwest, has shifted off. Now the high pressure is over Pennsylvania and New York,” Mr Jackson said in a phone interview. “As it moves east, it’ll bring in air from the south and we do expect it to warm up over the weekend.”
Rachel Liao (29) a student at the New School in New York, said she wished classes had been cancelled due to the cold. “I just want to stay inside,” Ms Liao, a New York native, said. “I’m not used to this.”
Records broken
More than 40 cold-temperature records were broken on Thursday, the coldest morning since the polar vortex moved in late on Tuesday. The mass of Arctic air had clung to a swath of the United States from Iowa and the Dakotas across the Great Lakes region and into Maine for days.
Officials across multiple states linked at least 21 deaths to the deep freeze. The death toll rose after at least nine more people in Chicago were reported to have died from cold-related injuries, according to Stathis Poulakidas, a doctor at the city’s John H Stroger Jr Hospital.
Amtrak train services that had been halted since Wednesday in Chicago’s hub resumed on Friday, as did US postal service that was halted or limited in six Midwest states.
Thousands of flights were cancelled and delayed earlier in the week, mostly out of Chicago, but on Friday the flight-tracking site FlightAware reported cancellations in the United States down to more than 400. – Reuters