One thousand flights grounded as snow storm hits northeast US

NEW YORK: Airlines were forced to cancel more than one thousand flights in the northeastern United States on Friday as a winter storm closed in, bringing a grim mixture of snow, sleet and freezing rain.   

Up to 45 centimeters of snow were forecast to fall on Friday in upstate New York, while New York City was due 20 centimeters, according to Kevin Lipton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.   

Much of the United States has experienced a milder than usual winter, with many in the northeast thinking spring had sprung early this week, but Lipton said the flurries were not unusual for the time of year.   

"You get snow sometimes in late March, sometimes you get it in April, we even have snow in May. In fact February and March are usually the snowiest months here in the Albany area" of New York state, he said.   

"This is more normal than abnormal," he added.   

Nevertheless, airlines canceled flights as a precaution, with Delta and budget carrier JetBlue between them grounding almost 500 flights.   

"The reason we do this is that proactively canceling flights allows Delta to begin re-accommodating customers in advance of a storm," said Delta spokesman Kent Landers.   

"We've learned over time it ensures that we can minimize the delay and cancelation impact throughout the storm."   

JetBlue spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the airline had canceled more than 200 flights as a precaution, mostly domestic services into and out of New York's Kennedy airport, but expected traffic to return to normal over the weekend.   

A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said more than 1,000 flights had been grounded at Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia airports. It has been an unusual year for weather in the northeast, with unseasonably mild temperatures in January, when the mercury hit 21 degrees Celsius, followed by record snow in parts of New York in February. Spring seemed to have come early this week, when temperatures in New York City briefly hit 21 degrees Celsius, but it proved a brief respite.   

Denis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said earlier in the year that a moderate El Nino was behind the unusual conditions.   

The cyclical phenomenon involves warmer sea temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that raise air temperatures and disrupt normal weather patterns.   

The phenomenon is named El Nino -- which means "the child" in Spanish and refers to Jesus -- because its effects are usually noticed around Christmas.   

"In a typical El Nino year, and this is certainly one of them, temperatures in the northern half of the country typically average out above normal -- well above normal," Feltgen said.   

A US government report released on Thursday said the Earth has experienced its warmest December-February since records began 128 years ago.   

A record warm January worldwide pushed average temperatures to 0.72 degrees Celsius above normal for the 20th century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.