Hundreds of thousands lose power and thousands of flights canceled as weather takes toll across northern and western states

A brutal winter storm closed interstate highways from Arizona to Wyoming on Wednesday, trapped drivers in cars, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and prompted the first blizzard warning in southern California in decades – and the worst won’t be over for several days

Meanwhile, pockets of the south-east will be cooking, with record-breaking warmth expected to stretch into the mid-Atlantic spiking temperatures more than 40F warmer than normal and creating weather that feels more “like June than February”, according to the National Weather Service.

California could see the coldest conditions of the season this week, after being hammered by rain and snow at the start of the year, and even low-lying areas far into the southern part of the state could see a dusting.

“This is shaping up to be a very unusual event,” climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a virtual briefing on Tuesday morning, noting that low-elevation snow will stretch from “the Oregon border to the Mexican border – it’s just a question of how low”.

For the first time since 1989, a blizzard warning was issued for the mountains of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, effective from 4am on Thursday to 4pm on Saturday, the National Weather Service said.

“Extremely dangerous mountain conditions coming,” the National Weather Service said on Twitter, adding that travel in those areas “will be a mess”. The “major snow event” could potentially reach into the foothills near Los Angeles, with several inches predicted even for elevations as low as 1,000ft, the agency said.

Daytime temperatures in southern California are unlikely to get out of the low to mid-50sF and potentially damaging winds reaching 50mph were predicted along the central coast, with gusts of 70mph possible in mountains.

More torrents of rain are also in store for the already sodden state, which is still recovering from the onslaught of severe storms at the start of the year. According to AccuWeather forecasters, the system brewing could deliver “a month’s worth of rain and possibly two times that amount or more in some locations”, with the potential to trigger flash floods and debris flows.

The first in a pair of storms expected to hit the state already wreaked havoc in the northern part of the state on Tuesday night, as powerful winds pulled down power lines and toppled trees. By Wednesday morning, more than 109,000 Californian customers were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us

Downed trees blocked major highways in the San Francisco Bay Area during rush hour on Tuesday evening and left a one-year-old child critically injured, after a redwood crashed onto a home in Boulder Creek, a community in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco, KTVU reported.

In the Pacific north-west, high winds and heavy snow in the Cascade mountains prevented search teams from reaching the bodies of three climbers killed in an avalanche on Washington’s Colchuck Peak over the weekend. The victims were identified Wednesday as Seong Cho, a 54-year-old male Korean citizen from West Hartford, Connecticut; Jeannie Lee, a 60-year-old woman from Bayside, New York; and Yun Park, a 66-year-old man from Palisades Park, New Jersey, the Chelan county sheriff’s office said.

Two experts from the Northwest Avalanche Center were hiking to the scene on Wednesday to determine if conditions might permit a recovery attempt later this week but they had not yet returned by Wednesday afternoon.

The wintry mix hit hard in the northern US, closing schools and offices and even shutting down the Minnesota legislature. Weather contributed to more than 1,600 US flight cancellations, according to the tracking service FlightAware. More than 400 of those were due to arrive or depart from the Minneapolis-St Paul international airport. Another 5,000-plus flights were delayed across the country

Even in regions accustomed to cold conditions, officials warned of the dangers of “whiteout conditions”, with the potential for historic snowfall in the midwest.

More than 20in (50.8cm) may pile up in parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the National Weather Service said. The Minneapolis-St Paul area could see 2ft of snow or more for the first time in over 30 years.

An NWS meteorologist, Frank Pereira, said the system was expected to affect about 43 million people.

Temperatures could plunge as low as -20F (-29C) on Thursday and to -25F (-32C) on Friday in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Wind chills may fall to -50F (-46C), said Nathan Rick, a meteorologist in Grand Forks.

Wind gusts may reach 50mph (80km/h) in western and central Minnesota, resulting in “significant blowing and drifting snow with whiteout conditions in open areas”, the weather service said.

“Sometimes it’s physically impossible to keep up with Mother Nature,” said North Dakota highway patrol sergeant Wade Kadrmas.

Schools throughout the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin were called off on Wednesday. Offices closed and so did the Minnesota legislature. The South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, shut down state executive branch offices in several parts of the state. In Wyoming, virtually every road was impacted. Officials warned closures could last for days.

The storm will make its way toward the east coast later in the week. Places that do not get snow may get dangerous ice. Forecasters expect up to a half-inch of ice in areas of southern Michigan, northern Illinois and some eastern states.

The potential ice storm has power company officials on edge. Nearly 1,500 line workers were ready to be deployed if the ice causes outages, said Matt Paul, executive vice-president of distribution operations for Detroit-based DTE Electric. He said a half-inch of ice could cause hundreds of thousands of outages

More than 192,000 customers in Michigan and nearly 89,000 in Illinois were without electricity on Wednesday evening, according to PowerOutage.us.

In the south-west on Wednesday, a more than 200-mile stretch of Interstate 40 from central Arizona to the New Mexico line closed due to wind gusts up to 80mph, plus snow and rain. Thousands were without power in Arizona.

Few places in the country will be untouched by the wild weather, as some areas prepare for the opposite extreme. Record highs were forecast from the mid-Atlantic states down through Florida, with some places expected to reach up to 40 degrees above normal.

While highs in Virginia hover in the 80s, they will drop to single digits in Maine, the NWS noted in Wednesday’s forecast. According to meteorologist Frank Pereira, “we could see record highs being set everywhere from Pittsburgh to as far south as Fort Myers, Florida