Northeast Wind May Cause Delays for Air Travelers Monday Morning

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. East Coast air travelers should prepare for a bumpy ride as high winds and buffeting gusts sweep the region while a winter storm passes to the north. Everyone else should tie down the lawn furniture and beware of tree limbs and wires falling from the sky.

Wind gust of 50 to 60 miles (80 to 100 kilometers) per hour could blow through New York on Monday as a cold front moves across the Northeast and a patch of low pressure spins up over New England, said Rich Otto, a forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

“In New York City winds will start to pick up tonight and the strongest winds will occur during the day tomorrow,” Otto said.

High winds cause travel problems for airlines and large trucks navigating interstate highways and other roads. In addition, the buffeting gusts can tear down tree limps and power lines creating outages, the National Weather Service said.

A high wind watch stretched from Iowa to Maine on Sunday, with wind advisories reaching as far south as Georgia. Air traffic delays in hubs such as Chicago, Atlanta or New York can have cascading effects across the rest of the continent.

Flight Delays

Early Sunday, the storm that’s sparking the East Coast wind threat had already begun to cause scattered flight cancellations and delays in Chicago and Toronto, according to FlightAware, an airline tracking company in Houston.

Otto said a storm bringing blizzard conditions to the upper Great Lakes is behind the wind storm. A front will push south bringing rain along with it Sunday and then the wind overnight into Monday for the East Coast. In addition, a patch of low pressure would be spawned over New England that would further aggravate things.

While the wind could bring on travel delays around the region, snow will remain far north of the East Coast cities.

Other wild weather over the weekend included a tornado that touched down in Columbus, Mississippi, on Saturday afternoon, killing at least one person and damaging businesses in the city of about 24,000. It was the first tornado-related death in the U.S. for 2019, according to weather.com.

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