The National Weather Service has issued winter storm watches or warnings for the Midwest to the West, including St. Louis; Kansas City, Missouri; Wichita, Kansas; Denver; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and South Lake Tahoe, California. The service has also issued flood warnings along some of the rivers in the South; the waters of the Mississippi River are running especially high.
“It’s not that uncommon to have a storm tracking from the West Coast to the East Coast,” said Paul Walker, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.
The storm is expected to make landfall on the West Coast on Friday night, Walker said. It will take until Sunday night to reach the East Coast, where it could bring a messy commute on Monday morning. But he cautioned that there remained much uncertainty about the storm.
Before the front arrives, the New York metro area could wake up to snow and rain showers on Saturday morning.
While New Yorkers are accustomed to late winter weather, snowy conditions last month in typically warmer states surprised residents.
In Los Angeles County, it snowed, oh so briefly, on Feb. 21 in Malibu, West Hollywood, Pasadena and Northridge, and the flakes mostly melted quickly. Los Angeles had not seen snow since January 1962. The silver lining of snow in California? The six to 10 feet that has fallen in the Sierra Nevada Mountains this winter has erased the drought conditions for most of California, Walker said, and so the state should not be as dry this summer, as the snowpack melts.
Hawaii had a midwinter storm that saw a 191-mph wind gust, 60-foot waves and snow on Maui. The snow may be the greatest accumulation seen at that low an elevation on Maui.
In the Southwest, Flagstaff, Arizona, received more than 30 inches during a storm in late February. The National Weather Service said that the Phoenix area had not had snow since 2015. The same storm that dumped nearly 3 feet in Phoenix gave Las Vegas its first measurable snow in more than a decade.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.