Weather Service Upgrades to Blizzard Warning for East Coast

Blizzard warnings were issued Saturday for New York City, New Jersey and coastal communities along the East Coast as a late-winter storm on track to arrive on Sunday threatened to make a mess of the start of a new week. The National Weather Service upped its assessment of the potential severity of a storm that was projected to be less ferocious only days earlier, the AP reports. The weather service said 1 to 2 feet of snow is possible in many areas, and flooding is also possible in parts of New York and New Jersey, the weather service said. Nearly 20 million people are under blizzard warnings from Sunday morning until Monday afternoon, per the New York Times.

The blizzard warnings cover New York City, Long Island, southern Connecticut and coastal communities in New Jersey and Delaware. "While we do get plenty of these nor'easters that produce heavy snow and strong impacts, it's been several years since we saw one of this magnitude across this large of a region in this very populated part of the country," said Cody Snell, a meteorologist at the service's Weather Prediction Center. Snell said the storm will arrive Sunday morning in areas around Washington, DC, before stretching toward Philadelphia and New York City and reaching Boston late Monday evening, per the AP.

The weather service warned that the storm, with steady winds of 25-35mph would "make travel dangerous, if not impossible." On Saturday, officials in Atlantic City, New Jersey, urged residents and casino visitors to stay off streets during the storm, especially in low-lying neighborhoods prone to flooding. It's the first blizzard warning New York City has faced since 2017.