In the heart of New York, Central Park is covered in a beautiful white coat on Tuesday, the megacity and other regions in the northeast of the USA – more than 30 million inhabitants – are paralyzed in places by 30 centimeters of snow.
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The American weather expected consequences of this snowstorm: More than 1,220 flights to and from New York were canceled at midday, including almost half of the flights at LaGuardia Airport, more than a quarter of the flights to Newark, New Jersey's major airport in New York York According to the Flight Aware website, York's suburbs account for 20% of traffic at the historic JFK airport platform.
AFP
Schools, courts and public offices are also closed and streets are nearly deserted after the National Weather Service (NWS) advised motorists to drive “with extreme caution” or “simply avoid traveling if possible.”
AFP
New York City (8.5 million inhabitants), its emblematic landmarks such as Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge or Times Square and all the suburbs where millions of other residents live, were covered in the morning with a thick and magnificent white coat that Epinal was reminiscent of images in the winter of one of the most famous cities in the world.
AFP
According to AFP photographers, there are few joggers and dogs in Central Park, but there are already a few snowmen and snowball fights.
AFP
The city's last snowfall dates back to January 16, ending 700 days without snow.
According to the New York City (NYC) warning system, “four to eight inches (10 to 20 cm) of snow is expected with wind gusts of 40 mph” during the day.
Accordingly, from dawn onwards, 2.5 to 5 cm of snow per hour fell on “certain areas” of the New York metropolitan area, particularly on the residential suburbs of Westchester County in the north of the city, which lie between the Atlantic Ocean and the Hudson River to the NWS.
AFP
The same is true in the west, in the industrial and bedroom suburbs of New Jersey, and in the east on the Long Island peninsula facing the Atlantic.
AFP
According to the NWS, a total of 32 million residents of the states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are affected by storms, with up to 33 cm of snow falling in cities in New Jersey.
Aside from the small snow episode in mid-January, New York City had not experienced such precipitation since February 2022.
At Christmas 2022, however, the “storm of the century” and more than a meter of snow claimed dozens of lives in the north and west of the vast, largely rural state of New York, including in the city of Buffalo on the Canadian border, hundreds of kilometers northwest of New York City.
In the United States and the rest of the world, the frequency, intensity, and unpredictability of summer and winter weather are increasing due to climate change.