Icy blasts pummeled parts of the U.S. Midwest on Wednesday, the first of five storms threatening a blitz of snow and sleet from Washington state to Washington, D.C., and as far south as Louisiana and Mississippi.
Frigid temperatures as low as minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 38 degrees Celsius) in Cut Bank, Montana, on Wednesday were blamed on a polar vortex threatening to move south as it hovers at the Canadian border, said meteorologist Dan Petersen at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
“It’s like a rapid-fire series of multiple storms coming,” Petersen said.
The polar vortex is a vast frigid air mass h…
Keep on reading: Five storms in 10 days loom amid bitter cold in north United States