Millions of travelers on Tuesday will battle severe weather and congested highways to reach loved ones for Thanksgiving. And according to forecasters, for many, it’s going to be a cold one.
The National Weather Service (NWS) said in an update early Monday that a pair of weather systems were expected to bring an “Arctic outbreak” across the Central U.S. Wednesday and into Thanksgiving Thursday.
Temperatures in the Northern Great Plains will only reach the high teens and 20s Tuesday and Wednesday, 15-25 degrees lower than the seasonal average. The NWS office for the Twin Cities said that Thursday could see lows of zero to 13 degrees Fahrenheit.
In central and southern California, the Great Basin and the Rockies, an atmospheric river event — an airborne flow of moisture that can bring heavy precipitation — was set to bring rain as well as up to three feet of snow in the southern Sierra Nevada.
It will be a wintery Thanksgiving for parts of the Upper Michigan Peninsular and areas downwind of Lake Ontario, with between 4 and 8 inches of snow expected.
As of 7 a.m. Tuesday, airports seemed to be handling the influx of Thanksgiving travelers; there was only one flight cancellation listed across the country Tuesday morning on FlightAware’s Misery Map of airline disruption, with just 55 delays.
Travel hubs also seemed to cope with an uptick in passengers on Monday. “I grew up in Connecticut, so I’ve been through this airport thousands of times and I’ve never seen it this easy getting through customs — no line today,” Father Jeff Couture, a Catholic priest who had just returned from a pilgrimage trip to Portugal, told NBC New York on Monday.
Janis and Ken Allen were flying to San Francisco from Newark Monday to visit their daughter — having traveled by train from Philadelphia, due to the lack of direct flights from there — and had not experienced any delays. They told NBC New York that they planned their return journey on Tuesday, Dec. 3, to avoid the post-holiday crush, as consumer travel groups including the AAA have advised.
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