Far northern Maine saw snow totals approaching 12 inches as a storm packing a wintry mix of precipitation exited the region. Snow was piling up at similar rates in northern Vermont.
The storm created slippery conditions across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Across the region, dozens of events were delayed or canceled because of the messy weather. In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills delayed the opening of state offices on Tuesday.
The storm brought mix of rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow.
It’s a prelude to the coldest weather of the season as an arctic airmass that started in Siberia spilled over a big chunk of the eastern half of the U.S., including the normally mild South, on Tuesday. In New England, temperatures were expected to plunge Tuesday night with wind chill readings possibly reaching about zero.
In other areas of the country, the mid-autumn taste of winter brought record single-digit temperatures to Chicago and environs; set snowfall records in Buffalo and Detroit; dusted cars with snow in Memphis, Tenn.; and froze lakes in Minnesota weeks earlier than usual.
Wisconsin farmer Bob Grove still has soybeans in the field, 20 miles south of Milwaukee, but said he can’t harvest them because the snow will clog the machinery.
“Normally, you don’t see this kind of weather to well into December,” Grove said. “It’s caught us off guard, as far as getting crops harvested. Doing what we can in between snow, rain, mud.”
The roughly 10 inches of snow in Buffalo and Detroit by Tuesday morning was a record depth for the time of year, weather service records show.
“This is an air mass that’s more typical for the middle of January than mid-November,” National Weather Service meteorologist Kevin Birk said in Chicago, where Tuesday morning’s low of 7 degrees broke the previous record of 8 set in 1986. “It is pretty much about the coldest we can be this time of year (and) it could break records all over the region.”
At least six cities in Kansas set new record lows Tuesday, led by Garden City, which dropped to minus 1, breaking the record of 7 set just last year. Records also fell in Wichita, Salina, Russell, Dodge City and Medicine Lodge.
In St. Louis, the mercury dipped to 11 degrees, breaking a record for the date that had stood since 1911.
In Ohio, authorities investigated two fatal wrecks in snowy and icy conditions Tuesday, one on the Ohio Turnpike in Richfield and another in Clark County. Seven passengers on a New York City-bound bus escaped serious injury when it turned on its side on a snow-slicked highway south of Syracuse. A section of Interstate 90 in Pennsylvania was back open Tuesday after being closed overnight because of jackknifed tractor-trailers.