The plans of millions of people to travel during Thanksgiving week, one of the busiest travel periods of the year, may be affected by the arrival of a cold front in the center and east of the country, threatening intense winds and a heavy snowstorm.
Weather forecasts indicate that the cold air mass can reach Minneapolis on Sunday night, Chicago on Monday morning, Pittsburgh on Monday afternoon, Washington DC on Monday night and Boston on Tuesday morning .
Hundreds of people prepared to travel for Thanksgiving are trapped in New York's Penn Station in a storm on Nov. 27, 2017. Seth Wenig / AP
There is "a lot of uncertainty in the forecast for Sunday night and early next week," however the National Weather Service warns in part this Wednesday.
That means that "the forecast has little confidence, especially in terms of exact amounts of precipitation, winds, and when the winds and precipitation will occur."
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Computer simulators have not been able to determine whether a large storm will form that will discharge heavy rainfall, which could affect the normal operation of major airports such as those in New York or Chicago or alter the highway network.
53.4 million people are expected to travel to celebrate Thanksgiving with their loved ones, according to figures from the American Automobile Association (AAA): 48.3 million will travel by car and 4.2 million by plane.
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"Even if the storm clears by Wednesday, airlines could continue to deal with significant previous cancellations with planes and crew members in the wrong place," says Myers, "this storm comes at a really bad time."
The front will send temperatures plummeting in the center and east of the country, with drops of between 15 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the upper Midwest and on the Great Lakes, the thermometer could read between 10 and 20 degrees Monday.
In the strip of the Middle Atlantic and the Northeast it could be between 30 and 40 degrees on Tuesday, after the passage of cold air, according to The Washington Post newspaper.
Wind gusts could reach 30 to 50 miles per hour.