As Cold Fronts Hit America, Half a Million Lose Power

More than 126,000 Californians are without electricity, reports ABC News. But Reuters notes that meanwhile 'more than 400,000 customers of Detroit based DTE Energy remained without power on Saturday, the Detroit News reported,' suffering through 'a separate storm that clobbered the U.S. Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes regions earlier this week' that finally moved over the Atlantic.

And ABC News notes that as of Saturday morning, 'more than 30 million Americans are under weather alerts in the West' — roughly 1 in 11 Americans — 'ranging from blizzard warnings in the mountains near Los Angeles to wind chill alerts in the Northern Plains' near Wyoming. But California's problems came from its own major storm that delivered heavy snow, record rainfall, and damaging winds — a storm that 'will be moving from southern California across the entire country over the next few days, eventually moving northeast by Tuesday.'

The Los Angeles area saw record rainfall on Friday, and it came along with 50- to 70-mile-per-hour winds. Burbank, California, saw 4.6 inches of rain Friday — stranding cars in floods and causing dozens of flight delays and cancellations. Records for daily rainfall were also set at the Los Angeles International Airport and the cities of Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto and Oxnard.... Multiple stretches of I-5 in Los Angeles County were shuttered on Saturday due to rain and snow.

Snowflakes even fell around the 'Hollywood' sign, reports Reuters. But bad weather wasn't just hitting southern California:

In Northern California, San Francisco was expected to experience record cold temperatures on Saturday, and the National Weather Service warned residents of the state capital of Sacramento to avoid travel from Sunday through Wednesday as rain and snow started up again after a reprieve on Saturday. 'Extreme impacts from heavy snow & winds will cause extremely dangerous to impossible driving conditions & likely widespread road closures & infrastructure impacts!' the agency said on Twitter. The next set of storms, expected to hit on Sunday, will bring wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) in the Sacramento Valley, and up to 70 miles per hour in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains....
A massive low-pressure system driven from the Arctic was responsible for the unusual conditions, said Bryan Jackson, a forecaster at the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

This week one political cartoonist suggested a connection between 'crazy weather' and climate change.

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