TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club(YJC)_One of the hardest-hit areas was Minnesota's Twin Cities region, which was blanketed in white by the same system that clobbered the Denver area a day earlier.
"Looks fun out there!" tweeted Chad Spitz from a Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport departure gate as he waited for one of nearly 50 delayed flights. He posted video of a snow-bound terminal with a fleet of snow plows clearing icy runways.
After parts of Colorado got up to 30 inches of snow on Tuesday, Minneapolis was expected to get as much as 12 inches as the system slid east, said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.
The storm, which is packing high winds, will move eastward on Wednesday across upper Michigan and upstate New York toward central Maine, which could get 6 to 10 inches (15 to 25 cm) of snow, the Weather Service forecast.
On the West Coast, a "bomb cyclone" - a winter storm that forms when the barometric pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours - slammed Oregon and Northern California, knocking down trees, bringing coastal flooding and stranding drivers on Interstate 5 with mountain snows of up to 4 feet (120 cm).
Heavy rain threatened flash floods from San Diego to Los Angeles, the weather service said.
Los Angeles International Airport told domestic passengers to arrive three hours early to beat highways clogged by traffic on one of the busiest travel days of the year.