(Bloomberg) — Washington, New York and the rest of the Northeast will get a quick blanket of heavy snow Sunday that could trample travel for the Super Bowl, the quasi-secular U.S. holiday when the National Football League plays its championship.
The snow will start before dawn in Washington and around 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. in New York, bringing as much as 5 to 7 inches (13 to 18 centimeters) to Manhattan’s Central Park before it winds down by late afternoon, the National Weather Service said. Eastern parts of Long Island and New England, including Boston, will likely get more. Travel throughout the region will be hazardous.
“It’s a pretty fast moving system, so it is probably going to snow hard for a few hours,” said Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center. “In Washington, and New York as well, it is probably done and gone by the afternoon. There’s maybe a six-hour window where it will be snowing hard.”
The storm comes on the heels of an earlier system that dropped 17.2 inches on Manhattan, tying up road, rail and air traffic across the Northeast. It will arrive across the region in the hours before the Super Bowl between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs starts at 6:30 p.m. in Tampa. There’ll be a reduced crowd due to Covid-19 restrictions.
With temperatures hovering near freezing along the coast, it will be a heavy, wet snow that could spark power outages if it brings down trees.
Coastal areas are in line to get hit the hardest from Sunday’s storm. While the early part of winter was mild and marked by few storms, the larger pattern across the U.S. has shifted, and cold air is pouring into the central part of the country.
Saturday’s low in Chicago will probably fall to -3 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 Celsius) and stay in single digits throughout the day Sunday, the weather service said. That cold could drift east and potentially set up another storm across the Northeast by the end of the week.