Intense lake-effect snow is creating dangerous travel conditions in the Great Lakes and it’s all being fueled by a record cold snap sending the eastern half of the United States into a brief bout of winter.

The snow developed overnight in Chicagoland along with thunder and strong winds. Forecasts for the city on Sunday called for potential historic November snow totals over 10 inches, but the heaviest bands of snow have spared the downtown area from those kinds of totals Monday.

Lake-effect snow totals often swing wildly from location to location depending on where heavier bands develop because of how narrow they are.

That’s what’s happened Monday near Lake Michigan. Up to a foot of snow has fallen more than 50 miles south of Chicago, and totals north of the city from far northeast Illinois into southeast Wisconsin have topped 10 inches. Dangerous travel conditions from snow and strong winds were reported early Monday along Interstate 57 south of Chicago in Kankakee and northern Iroquois counties in Illinois, the National Weather Service said.

The snow threat stretches beyond Chicago across the Great Lakes. It’s being spawned by a rush of Arctic air that’s unusually cold for November pushing south and east and threatening dozens of low temperature records as far south as Florida over the next couple of days.

Over a foot of snow fell in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northwest Indiana. Several inches of snow will pile up in the eastern Great Lakes through Tuesday, particularly in the snow belts of northeast Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania and southwest New York. Places like Cleveland, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York could still be dealing with snow falling during the morning commute on Tuesday.

This brutal winter-like setup in the Midwest is being driven by the same Arctic air mass that’s crashing across the eastern two-thirds of the country. This isn’t just a “cold front.” This is a full-scale polar plunge.

Some southeastern cities could face some of their coldest early-November temperatures in decades on Tuesday morning.

Daily record lows will be threatened in parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, southeast Louisiana and even Florida. That includes places like Birmingham and Huntsville in Alabama, Baton Rouge in Louisiana, Savannah in Georgia and Tampa and Fort Myers in Florida.

Jacksonville, Florida, is predicted to hit 30 degrees Tuesday morning, marking the earliest it’s been that cold in fall since 1976. That would also be the case in Savannah, Georgia, if the low drops to 28 degrees.