Messy winter storm set to drop snow, rain from NYC to Toronto

Brian K. Sullivan, Bloomberg News on Feb 15, 2025

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New York and the U.S. Northeast will pick up a few inches of snow overnight on Saturday from a winter storm that will also blanket the Midwest and southern Ontario.

New York City may get 1 to 2 inches of snow beginning late afternoon on Saturday before changing to rain. The system will spread heavier snow over a much wider area, with Boston potentially picking up as much as 6 inches and Toronto as much as 14 inches.

“The really big snow will be on the west side of the storm across parts of Indiana and into Ontario,” said Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center. “The heaviest snow will miss the big cites on the East Coast.”

Winter weather advisories and storm warnings stretch from Nebraska to Maine, according to the U.S. National Weather Service.

Environment and Climate Change Canada has issued similar bulletins across Ontario and Quebec. Ottawa may get as much as 16 inches of snow with the heaviest amounts falling Sunday. The storm will likely lead to many air travel delays and cancellations. At least 133 flights at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport have been canceled through Sunday, FlightAware, an airline tracking company, said.

There is a high potential for an ice storm to develop across central Massachusetts and parts of southern New Hampshire that could lead to power outages, said Rob Carolan, owner of Hometown Forecast Services, which provides forecasts for Bloomberg Radio.

The storm is part of a blast of winter weather as the polar vortex stretches, allowing arctic cold to tumble down from Canada into the central U.S.

Deep cold will sweep into the central U.S. and by Thursday at least 55 records for low temperatures may be tied or broken across the Great Plains and south into Texas, according to the Weather Prediction Center. In all, hundreds of records for the date may fall next week.

It’s common for large winter storms to form at the edges of these cold outbreaks, which gives forecasters more confidence the East Coast should prepare for wild weather.

Another snow storm could blanket Richmond to New York and possibly New England by the middle of next week, according to forecasts. There isn’t complete agreement among computer forecast models, but as the time nears they should start to form a consensus, said Oravec.

“It has the potential to be a major storm,” Oravec said. “We’re way overdue for a big storm.”