More than 150,000 customers are without power across Texas and Louisiana as a powerful snowstorm moves through the southern states early Monday morning.
Poor road conditions are possible across Texas and Louisiana during the Monday morning commute, including dark street lights and signals due to the widespread outages.
Areas of east and northeast Texas, including Lamesa which received nine inches of snowfall, have already seen poor visibility due to fog, according to tweets from NWS Midland.
The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has encouraged people to travel only if absolutely necessary. Crews have been salting roadways and warned that closures are possible as snowfall continues.
The snow is expected to move out of Texas into southern Arkansas, through north and central Louisiana, and parts of Mississippi and Alabama through Monday, according to CNN Meteorologist Gene Norman.
Accumulation will vary, but Norman said it will mainly be between one to three inches.
The National Weather Service says a winter storm warning remains in effect until about 6 a.m. local time Monday.
Record Snow Amounts
Snowfall reports show some areas in Texas got up to nine inches, including Moshein near Waco in the central part of the state, and Lamesa and Denver City in the west Texas.
Waco received 4.4 inches—the most snow it’s seen since 1982—according to a tweet from NWS Fort Worth. That’s the tenth highest 24-hour snowfall event on record for the area, beating the daily record of 1.1 inches that was set in 1973, the tweet said.
NWS Austin/San Antonio said on Twitter that the area saw up to six inches of snow Sunday. “The last time that happened was Christmas Day 2004, when our Coastal Plains counties had a very white Christmas,” the tweet said.
Jackson, Mississippi, could see about four years’ worth of snow accumulation come Monday morning, CNN Meteorologist Pedram Javaheri said.
The average snowfall for the area is only one inch a year and three to four inches are forecast to fall in this storm, according to Javaheri.
There have only been 11 occasions when accumulations have exceeded four inches of snow in a season in 126 years of record keeping, Javaheri added, meaning a weather event like this occurs once every 12 years on average.