A front with the coldest air in the last three years crosses the northern United States

By Kathryn Prociv -

More than 15 million people are on Monday under alert for the extreme cold front that extends from the north of the Great Plains, the Midwest to the interior of the Northeast and New England, with the lowest temperatures in the last three years .

Wind chill in the Upper Midwest is expected to be as low as 45 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and in the Northeast and New England as low as 35 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

Monday will be the coldest day of the week for the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes, and Tuesday for the East.

The snowstorm is leaving the East Coast and will now be hit by an extreme cold wave

Jan. 8, 202201: 58

On Tuesday the forecast of maximum temperature for New York will be 22 degrees and for Boston 12 degrees, the lowest since 2019.

As extremely cold air flows over the largely ice-free Great Lakes, the combination will lead to the possibility of

[Snowstorms impact several US states causing road and school closures]

As of Monday morning, there were five million people on a lake effect snow alert on the Great Lakes.

At dawn, a mega snow front stretched 250 miles from the shore of Lake Ontario (south of Watertown, New York) to western Massachusetts.

A couple walk through the snow in Manhattan on January 7, Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Snow is expected to hit Cleveland, Ohio;

and to Buffalo and Syracuse, in New York, with up to two feet of snow in the most affected localities.