Bad news: expect more travel chaos this holiday season.
Bad weather during the post-Christmas weekend resulted in more than 11,000 flight delays and 1,000 cancellations within, into, or out of the US on Saturday, according to aircraft tracking website FlightAware.
Trouble persisted on Sunday, with more than 9,300 flight delays and 780 cancellations as of press time.
Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, and Chicago’s O’Hare International saw the highest number of canceled flights in the US on Sunday.
In a notice on Sunday, the National Weather Service said that over the next 48 hours, an “intense cyclone will take the center stage.”
This will result in heavy snow and blizzard conditions across the upper Midwest to the Great Lakes, freezing rain across New England, and thunderstorms across the East Coast and the South, the notice said.
“Across the central Great Lakes, wind-swept rain and embedded thunderstorms later today into tonight are forecast to turn into a blizzard by early on Monday with blowing snow,” the weather service said on Sunday.
A map by the service on Sunday showed winter weather and storm warnings for most of the Northeast.
The warnings come after New York City received more than four inches of snowfall on Saturday, the most since January 2022. Photos showed Central Park under a thick blanket of snow.
Airports in the city, including John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty, issued travel advisories on Friday, warning passengers of potential travel disruptions because of poor weather.
The snowstorms come during a peak travel period in the US. The American Automobile Association predicted in a December 10 report that 122.4 million Americans would travel at least 50 miles from home between December 20 and January 1, 2026.
Of these, it said 8.03 million travelers would travel by domestic flights, a 2.3% increase from the same period last year.
