Officials were bracing for winds to pick up overnight in the Los Angeles area, likely fanning the Palisades fire and creating conditions for other wildfires to spread across Southern California. Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that some of the strongest winds were expected in Southern California between 10 p.m. local time through 5 a.m. on Wednesday. “By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods,” Governor Newsom said. The fire, which had already affected about 1,200 acres, more than doubled in size to 2,900 acres in a matter of hours by Tuesday evening, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.The National Weather Service office that serves the Los Angeles area said that it had received dozens of reports of strong winds across Southern California, including some wind gusts that were greater than 70 miles per hour. Forecasters warned that the winds could be even stronger overnight. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Los Angeles Fire Department asked its employees on Tuesday evening to check in and report whether they were available. At least 200 firefighters worked throughout the day to contain the Palisades fire. Officials also warned that in addition to fueling wildfires, the winds could also ground helicopters and other aircraft that were being used to help contain the fire with retardant from above and provide aerial reconnaissance. By 7 p.m. local time, concerns about having to ground aircraft had already been realized. Aircraft that were being used to put out the Palisades fire were temporarily grounded as winds picked up in the Los Angeles area, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. Officials were monitoring conditions to see when aircraft could resume operations. Earlier in the afternoon, Chief Anthony Marrone of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said at the news conference that lower temperatures overnight could help.“But with increased wind speed, aerial firefighting becomes more dangerous,” Chief Marrone said. “If the winds are going to get worse right now, it’s going to be very difficult for our aerial assets to actually make a difference for the folks on the ground.” As the news conference ended, Chief Kristin Crowley of the Los Angeles Fire Department urged residents in the area to be prepared in case they were ordered to evacuate later on Tuesday. Chief Crowley said that the wind conditions were dynamic and that they could “quickly change on a dime.”

Snow, icy roads and frigid temperatures brought on by a storm moving through the Mid-Atlantic region on Monday disrupted a return to routine for millions of people after the two-week Christmas holiday period. In addition to closing offices and schools, the storm also interrupted travel across parts of the country with delayed and canceled trains and airplanes. Travel conditions were particularly bad in Washington, where Ronald Reagan National Airport closed all runways Monday evening, an unwelcome development during an extraordinarily busy week for the nation’s capital. Earlier Monday, Congress certified President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory in one of its first acts of business in the new year, and on Thursday, President Jimmy Carter’s funeral will be held at Washington National Cathedral. The storm caused more than 9,000 flights, at airports from Texas to New York, to be delayed or canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. Airports in the Greater Washington, D.C., metro area were most affected, with more than 80 percent of the departures at National Airport canceled. The airport said that it closed runways to allow airport crews to focus on snow removal before temperatures dropped further. Emily McGee, an airport spokeswoman, said that while terminals would remain open with limited services, the runways would likely remain closed until Tuesday morning. At National’s baggage claim area, weary travelers stood in line to make lost luggage claims with their airlines. Others sat on their bags, on the floor and on the luggage carousel, checking their phones or making calls or trying to get a few minutes of sleep. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Philadelphia International Airport and Kennedy International Airport in New York relied on ground stops during the day to manage air traffic and prevent airports from being overwhelmed, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. More than 400 delayed departures were announced at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and the number of delayed flights crept up at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.Among the carriers hardest hit were American Airlines, with more than 1,000 flights delayed, or 30 percent of its daily routes, and Southwest Airlines, which delayed more than 990 flights, or 27 percent of its daily schedule, according to FlightAware. Southwest also canceled more than 500 flights.Southwest, Delta Air Lines and other airlines issued travel waivers allowing customers to rebook their travel with no change fees through more than a dozen cities hit by winter weather. The advisory didn’t help Nick Grimaldi, who was scheduled to fly from Jamaica to his home in Virginia Beach, Va., on Monday with his family after a holiday trip. Their 2 p.m. flight departing from Montego Bay and bound for Baltimore-Washington International Airport was repeatedly delayed, and ultimately canceled. Their connecting flight to Norfolk, Va., where their car is parked, was canceled. His children will miss at least another day of school. Mr. Grimaldi said that he was frustrated that Southwest hadn’t canceled their flight to Baltimore earlier, when flights on other airlines were still available. Now, he said, he’ll spend all night trying to arrange flights to get back home tomorrow. Editors’ Picks Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? How to Manage Your Blood Sugar With Exercise “Today has been a roller coaster. We felt like it was all under control leaving the resort,” said Mr. Grimaldi, 47, in an direct message over social media. “Southwest has to work on its process and allow customers to get out of their flights once it’s not going as planned, especially when the snowstorm was always coming." Train service was also significantly disrupted. Citing severe winter weather and equipment issues, Amtrak canceled dozens of trains in the Northeast and Midwest. Destinations affected included Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago and Raleigh, N.C. One air traveler in Washington wasn’t too perturbed, even after her flight plans from National Airport were rescheduled multiple times over two days. Aleena Shahan, who lives in Richmond, Va., planned to fly to Cincinnati on Delta Sunday evening for business, but her original flight, and then three more on Monday, were canceled. She’s staying with family and has been rescheduled again for another flight Tuesday morning. ”They’ve been pretty good with rebooking us,” she said of Delta. Travel was expected to remain snarled throughout Monday evening. Washington and Baltimore could get more light snow as the storm moves on, the National Weather Service said, and parts of New England could see snow in the days to come. Another winter storm is anticipated to affect Texas later this week.

In the 1930s, a terrible drought plunged farming communities across the United States into catastrophe. As millions of Americans abandoned their homes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created something remarkable: the Resettlement Administration, which sought to move entire communities to newly built towns such as Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio. Almost a century after the Dust Bowl, America is on the cusp of another displacement crisis, this one caused primarily by climate change. At the end of 2022, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international nonprofit, counted 543,000 Americans who fled their homes to escape a disaster and had not yet returned. As the country’s 20th-century infrastructure becomes increasingly incompatible with the 21st-century climate, this number will grow. When it does, the fates of entire regions, and particularly coastal areas, will fracture along economic fault lines. With the Resettlement Administration long gone, no federal agency bears responsibility for helping the most threatened and remote communities relocate if they wish to do so. Policymakers have essentially abandoned those Americans who need to move to safety in the wake of losing their land to rising seas and worsening storms. This failure is especially striking because since the middle of the 20th century, the United States has almost always offered some form of compensation (however paltry) when its citizens’ land is taken. But most rural communities on the front lines of climate change are not granted the same consideration. While climate change is not eminent domain, the distinction hardly matters from the perspective of a displaced community. Wealthy, dense cities such as New York, London and Venice have spent billions on elaborate infrastructure that will shield many residents (but by no means all) from extreme weather. But rural towns and villages generally lack the resources to build enormous sea walls or levees to hold back storms and the rising tide. Many of these communities will have no choice but to relocate. They could either do so on their own terms (if the government would help them), or wait until disaster renders their homes unlivable and their options much more dire.The village of Shaktoolik, Alaska, where I’ve conducted research since 2022, is one such place. Its 250 residents, almost all of whom are Inupiaq, live on a blush of land barely more than a sandbar on the storm-prone Bering Sea. There is no road along which residents could evacuate, nor a harbor where boats could safely dock during a storm. Instead, a short gravel airstrip is the primary connection between this community and the rest of North America. A 2009 government report described Shaktoolik as “imminently threatened” by coastal erosion and flooding. In 2022, a typhoon barreled out of a record-hot Pacific Ocean and destroyed the gravel levee that was the village’s only defense against being swept out to sea. The disaster confirmed what many elders and engineers had said for years: The people of Shaktoolik must relocate to higher ground, and quickly. When displacement is unplanned, it can shatter communities, with residents scattering to distant cities, unable or unwilling to return. For Native communities in particular, giving up a homeland endangers language, culture, sovereignty and traditional hunting, fishing and harvesting. Planned relocation, by contrast, allows communities to remain intact as they move collectively to safety. For Shaktoolik, that safe place would likely be the low-lying hills 12 miles away, set back from the eroding coastline but still within the tribe’s homeland. Editors’ Picks Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? How to Manage Your Blood Sugar With Exercise Because there is no one agency that coordinates relocations, communities must patch together funding from as many as 12 separate entities in Washington, often by applying to dozens of competitive grant programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and others. When evaluating proposals, federal officials often require that applicants undertake a cost-benefit analysis that places poor communities at a disadvantage. Villages can tally up their modest housing stock and limited infrastructure, but the cultural and spiritual value of remaining intact is excluded from the final balance sheet. In the last 25 years, just two American communities, both of them Indigenous, have cleared these hurdles. The first, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, took 20 years to complete the process. The second, Newtok in Alaska, is in the final steps of its relocation, after more than 30 years of planning and fund-raising. While Shaktoolik’s leaders have applied for relocation funding from various federal agencies, the community hasn’t yet raised enough. Some of its proposals have been funded; many have been denied. In December, the Biden administration recommended changes to the bureaucratic morass hindering community relocation. But it stopped short of instituting these recommendations, or taking the critical step of designating a single agency to lead on climate relocation. Under the second Trump administration, leadership on community relocation will be a tough sell for Republican lawmakers looking to pay for tax cuts. But conservatives who are enthralled with the notion of efficiency should remember that it generally costs less in the long run to act than to wait until the damage is done. A study commissioned by Louisiana, for example, projected that coastal protection efforts would spare the state $11 billion to $15 billion annually in climate-induced damage. To date, the general response to climate-vulnerable communities has been the policy equivalent of a shrug. But by failing to ensure that rural Americans can relocate, their futures become collateral damage in the political gridlock that haunts the climate crisis, while most government officials are safe behind sea walls and sophisticated flood defense systems. Americans deserve better. What was clear to policymakers during the Dust Bowl should not be a matter of controversy or inaction today. Those communities that wish to relocate must be able to move to terra firma while remaining whole.

A large winter storm that is expected to bring strong winds and heavy snow to a dozen states arrived in the Great Plains on Saturday, forcing officials to close the Kansas City airport in Missouri and an 18-mile section of Interstate 70 in Kansas. The Kansas City International Airport was closed for about two hours on Saturday while crews worked to clear runways but flights resumed in the evening, Quinton Lucas, the city’s mayor, said on social media. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas declared a state of emergency in the state on Saturday afternoon, as officials braced for the storm to worsen. The Kansas City region was under a blizzard warning until 3 a.m. on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service, which predicted that the area would be blanketed by nine to 14 inches of snow and face wind gusts of up to 40 miles per hour. “Travel could be very difficult to impossible,” the service said in an update. The airport’s closure delayed a Kansas City Chiefs team flight to Denver by about three hours but the team was in the air by 5:30 p.m. local time, Brad Gee, a spokesman for the Chiefs, said. The Chiefs were scheduled to play the Broncos on Sunday afternoon. The storm was also wreaking havoc on the state’s highways. In a video filmed near a rolled-over semi on Interstate 135 in Kansas and posted on social media, Trooper Ben Gardner of the Kansas Highway Patrol said that the highway was “very, very slick” and that “it’s not getting any better.” “Get off the roads,” he said. “Don’t be on ’em because it’s not good and it might result in something really bad happening. Stay home.”An icy, 18-mile section of Interstate 70 closed at about 3 p.m. because of crashes and spinoffs, said Kim Stich, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Transportation. Earlier in the day, another three-mile section of the highway closed but then reopened. The storm was forecast to intensify in Kansas and then move east along Interstate 70, bringing heavy snow and blistering cold along a band in the Midwest and then to the Mid-Atlantic.Several states on the storm’s path, including Arkansas, Kentucky and Virginia, declared states of emergency in anticipation of its arrival. Cities including Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis treated roads in advance of the storm and prepared warming centers.Some places may get their heaviest snowfall in a decade or more, forecasters said early on Saturday as widespread winter storm warnings took effect. The Weather Service issued a smattering of winter watches, advisories and warnings for regions, stretching from eastern Colorado to New Jersey. “It’s going to be a very impactful storm affecting a pretty huge area of the country,” said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. As the storm moves on, arctic air is predicted to settle in its wake, as some of the most frigid temperatures of the season are expected to linger for days. The governors of Missouri and Indiana put the National Guard in their states on standby, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia declared a state of emergency and urged people to avoid traveling on Sunday. In Kansas, plows would be out throughout Saturday night, according to the state’s Transportation Department.The Prediction Center said that some of the most extreme conditions are likely in places to the north of and running along the Interstate 70 corridor, which passes through St. Louis and Indianapolis. “The focus of the heaviest snow will be to the south of Chicago,” said Rich Bann, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. Moderate lake-effect snow could also hit the Upper Great Lakes and Lake Erie through Sunday morning, forecasters said. The Prediction Center also warned of “significant icing potential” in the mid-South this weekend. Sleet and freezing rain could wreak havoc from eastern Kansas and the Ozarks, stretching east to the Tennessee and lower Ohio Valleys. “That rain will freeze on contact and turn to glazing — that’s what sticks to the trees, power lines, roads, cars, car windows, everything,” Mr. Bann said. The southern Appalachian Mountains are also at risk of icing on Sunday and Sunday night. There was an enhanced risk, the second level out of five, that severe thunderstorms on Sunday could form in parts of the Lower Mississippi Valley and bring lightning, wind gusts, hail and tornadoes. From Sunday into Monday, the storm is on track to cross the Appalachians and push into the Mid-Atlantic region, including the Washington, D.C., area, along with western Maryland, Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware. By daybreak on Monday, snow is expected to fall across the Mid-Atlantic region and continue through the day. The storm is arriving at a time when the country is poised to experience what the Weather Service called a “significant arctic outbreak.” Temperatures are expected to plummet to below average in areas east of the Rocky Mountains, reaching as far south as the Gulf Coast and Florida, with the frigid weather lasting into mid-January.

A winter storm in Northern California spawned a tornado on Friday, setting off a warning for people to seek shelter urgently. The tornado was confirmed around 5:30 p.m. local time near Paynes Creek and Shingletown, the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office said in an alert on Friday. A tornado warning, which indicates an imminent life-threatening danger, was active until 6 p.m., the alert said. The Weather Service shared a video captured by the University of California, San Diego, of a tornado passing a grassy area.The warning urged residents to take cover because flying debris and damage to property was expected. The alert covered parts of Tehama and Shasta counties with an estimated population of 2,200 people, according to the Weather Service. A winter storm that brought heavy snow and strong wind gusts spawned the tornado, said Katrina Hand, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. There were no reports of injuries or damage, she added. A winter storm warning was active throughout the day, with eight to 12 inches of snow in areas above 5,500 feet and quarter-size hail forecast. Tornadoes are not uncommon for that part of California and the storms in the region this time of year, Ms. Hand said. She added that the state averages about 10 tornadoes annually, most commonly in the northern half of the Central Valley, where the tornado was observed on Friday. Less than a month earlier, the National Weather Service issued its first-ever tornado warning for San Francisco. The city was spared, but one touched down in nearby Santa Cruz County, where it downed power lines and caused vehicle crashes.

As the old year ticked off its last minutes, New Orleans seemed ready for the new one. The city had gone through a rough stretch, but things were looking up. The gun violence that surged to harrowing levels during the pandemic had fallen off dramatically. The Super Bowl, returning to New Orleans in February after a dozen years, promised an influx of visitors and excitement. And the city’s best season, the exuberant weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, was on its way. But less than four hours into the new year, a heavily armed man slammed a truck into the celebrating crowds, leaving dozens wounded or dead on the city’s most carefree street. In the news conferences that followed, the mayor of New Orleans and other leaders in Louisiana praised the city’s residents for their resilience amid disaster. It’s a message they had heard before. “The word ‘resilient’ has become synonymous with the city of New Orleans,” Lesli Harris, a city councilwoman, said in an interview, acknowledging that the quality was a source of both pride and exasperation. “We are resilient because we have to be.” Many people in New Orleans have expressed a certain comfort and satisfaction at the strength of the community’s bonds and its collective ability to navigate disaster and hardship. Yet they also wouldn’t mind being able to get by without having to draw on a reservoir of grit and good humor.“You’ve got to suck it up and figure it out,” said Rachel Zachry Dutcher, who works at an oyster bar on Bourbon Street, where she saw the scale of the carnage the morning after the attack. “But at what point,” she said with an expletive, “do we stop sucking up the stuff we shouldn’t have to suck up?” The attack in New Orleans could have happened anywhere that a New Year’s Eve crowd had gathered. But it happened in a city that has had to endure far more than its share of heartache and dislocation. Twenty years ago this summer, New Orleans was four-fifths underwater after the levee system designed to protect it collapsed under the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. There was talk of abandoning parts of the city altogether. But people returned and rebuilt homes, started businesses and nonprofits, and worked not just to keep the city alive but to make it better than it had been before.There was a sense of promise at the time, punctuated by the Saints, the beloved but long-cursed football franchise, winning its first Super Bowl in 2010. Surveys taken by the University of New Orleans over that decade showed a city that, for all of its many challenges, was optimistic about the future. But that optimism curdled.To some degree, this was fate: New Orleans’s disproportionate share of calamity is in part a function of where it was built, a location that, in an age of climate change, has turned out to be especially precarious. Since 2020, the average U.S. county has experienced between one and two federally declared disasters. In that same time span, every part of the state of Louisiana has experienced at least a dozen. In recent years, New Orleans streets have flooded when the city’s archaic drainage system could not keep pace with the increasingly torrential rainstorms. Hurricane Ida battered the Louisiana coast in 2021, leaving the city without power for weeks and with thousands of tons of uncollected trash. Covid ravaged New Orleans in the earliest stages of the pandemic, infecting and killing residents in those first few months at higher rates than most other U.S. cities and upending the livelihoods of thousands of residents who relied on the mostly low-wage tourism economy. The number of murders and carjackings soared, making New Orleans in 2022, once again, a so-called murder capital. Living in New Orleans had always required some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but it was reaching a point where affection for New Orleans and its way of life was being overshadowed by the litany of complications that came with it. Home and auto insurance premiums soared to unaffordable levels. Residents said they were becoming less and less surprised to find their car windows smashed. When the University of New Orleans conducted its biannual quality of life survey in 2022, the results were bleak. “We saw numbers we hadn’t seen since the 1990s, when we had a murder epidemic in the city,” said Edward Chervenak, the director of the university’s Survey Research Center.Residents who had the resources to leave were increasingly opting to do so. Those who did not have the resources to leave often felt stuck in a precarious position. For them, affordable housing was scarce, as were well-paying jobs, much less the prospect of long-term financial security, residents said. Ms. Zachry Dutcher’s husband, Timothy, said he makes $17 an hour at his restaurant job — and he considered himself lucky. Some restaurant workers were making half of that. (The minimum wage in Louisiana is $7.25.) The only recourse: pick up more hours. “You can’t stop moving,” Mr. Dutcher, 36, said. And yet, Mr. Dutcher is a fairly recent arrival, moving from Colorado over the summer. New Orleans is a culinary destination, he said, that also offers an atmosphere and a possibility for forging a community that he could not find elsewhere. When the citywide survey was conducted again late last year, it showed a curious change. “People were dissatisfied about the city of the last five years,” Professor Chervenak said, “but seemed to be optimistic about the future.” The violence that bedeviled New Orleans in the first years of the pandemic has receded substantially, with major drops in the number of homicides, carjackings and armed robberies. Ms. Harris also pointed out that it is a local election year, spurring an exchange of ideas about the city’s direction and representing a moment for New Orleans to start a new chapter. “I think there was anticipation that we could be on the upswing,” said Ms. Harris, who represents a district adjacent to the French Quarter. “And here comes this attack.”The attack did not just rattle the city, leaving people anguished over the lost lives, wary about what else could happen and suspicious, once again, about whether the authorities might have been able to do something to prevent it. It also interrupted a hopeful moment that the city had been awaiting for years, and left it back in the familiar position of relying on its storied grit. “I’m sick and tired of being resilient, too,” said Calvin Johnson, 78, a retired Orleans Parish judge. But, he said, “you go back over our illustrious history” — 300 years, he said, of disease, hurricanes, violence and inequality — “and this is the place that can withstand all of that and still be something.” On Thursday, Eric Moore, 29, was sitting on a folding chair in a parking lot on Canal Street, waiting along with dozens of other volunteers to give blood. He works at a cafe on Bourbon Street, though he wasn’t there at the time of the attack and doesn’t have much desire to go back soon. “I don’t want to see Bourbon Street right now, at all,” he said. Mr. Moore said he understood that bad things happened on Bourbon Street — shootings have broken out all too often there in recent years — but he emphasized that the attack early Wednesday morning was a very different kind of bad thing. Still, he said, the city would band together and make it through. Again. “We came back from Katrina,” Mr. Moore said. “We got some work to do, some healing to do. But we’re going to be all right.”

Cold air seeped south of the Canadian border and into the United States on Friday, the start of what the National Weather Service is calling a “significant Arctic outbreak” that is expected to bring frigid conditions to large swaths of the country this weekend and last into mid-January. While most of the cold was still in southern Canada on Friday, the United States was getting its first wave of it. Chilly air was spreading into the northern High Plains, across northeastern Montana, across northern North Dakota and into northwestern Minnesota, according to the Weather Prediction Center. In parts of northern North Dakota, temperatures dropped to a bone-chilling minus 10 degrees, with wind chills making it feel like 20 to even 30 degrees below zero. “It’s quite brutal,” said David Hamrick, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. “This is just the leading edge, the tip of the iceberg in terms of Arctic air mass coverage. The cold is coming down in waves” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Winter storms are also expected to follow in the wake of the plunging temperatures. Temperatures are forecast to plummet below average for much of the nation, with the most severe cold gripping areas east of the Rocky Mountains and reaching as far south as the Gulf Coast and Florida. Dangerous wind chills are likely across many areas of the Southeast, too.“This will likely be the most significant cold we have seen in years,” said forecasters at the National Weather Service office in Wakefield, Va., adding that the bout of below-normal temperatures “is likely to prevail into mid-January.”This Arctic outbreak is expected to bring a sustained period of cold weather across the northern Plains, Great Lakes, Midwest and East Coast as well. Snow and ice are predicted, too. The Weather Prediction Center has also warned that a winter storm will begin in the Central Plains on Saturday night. Heavy snow and significant icing are expected to spread east, potentially affecting the Mid-Atlantic by early next week.The current forecast includes a high likelihood of at least six inches of snow in parts of the Central Plains and Mississippi Valley, particularly along and north of Interstate 70. Icing is also expected, with sleet and freezing rain forecast for eastern Kansas and the Ozarks. These hazards may extend into the Tennessee and low Ohio Valleys through the weekend, and parts of the southern Appalachian Mountains could experience icing by Sunday. On Sunday and Monday, the risk of severe weather, including strong winds and lightning, could extend to parts of eastern Texas, much of Louisiana and Mississippi, into southern Arkansas and possibly western Tennessee. Next week the Climate Prediction Center’s hazards outlook predicts a high risk of much-below-normal temperatures for the Southeastern United States and portions of the Lower Mississippi and Tennessee Valleys. Heavy snow is also possible for the Great Lakes region and portions of the Southern Plains through the Mid-Atlantic toward the end of the week. Social media buzz about the chance of a foot of snow in Atlanta has drawn some doubts from local forecasters. Dylan Lusk, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Atlanta, wrote that “ingredients to get snow in the south are fickle,” and that for such a scenario to unfold, two weather systems would need to converge in a unique way. “Experience tells me not to get my hopes up for snow just yet. Stay tuned to the forecast!”The National Weather Service echoed this uncertainty in its latest advisory, saying that the timing and trajectory of the storm track will be key factors in identifying areas that could get the most significant weather. While the possibility of snow next week remains less predictable, forecasters are much more certain about the cold. “This has the potential to be a fairly significant Arctic outbreak,” said meteorologist Scott Kleebauer with the Weather Prediction Center. “The one thing for sure is that it’s going to get cold, and it’s going to last a fairly long period of time.”

A light, 4.7-magnitude earthquake struck in Northern California on Wednesday, according to the United States Geological Survey. The temblor happened at 6:34 p.m. Pacific time about 2 miles northwest of Cobb, Calif., or about 70 miles north of San Francisco, data from the agency shows. As seismologists review available data, they may revise the earthquake's reported magnitude. Additional information collected about the earthquake may also prompt U.S.G.S. scientists to update the shake-severity map.Aftershocks can occur days, weeks or even years after the first earthquake. These events can be of equal or larger magnitude to the initial earthquake, and they can continue to affect already damaged locations.