Sprawling and potentially devastating winter storm is projected to slam a massive swath of the country tomorrow and through the weekend, from New Mexico all the way to northern Maine.

Heavy snow, life-threatening cold, and dangerous ice accumulation are all in the forecast.

More than 130 million people are currently under winter storm alerts and nearly every American east of the

Rockies will be affected. That's according to the National Weather Service. To help break down what we

expect to see and how you can prepare, we're joined now by My Radar Senior Meteorologist Matthew

Capucci. Thanks for coming in. Yeah, good to be here. I have to say the scale of this storm is

matched only by its intensity. I mean, the fact that we have roughly 1,800 miles nonstop of winter storm alerts, watches warnings from Arizona all the way to the East Coast, shows just how big this storm is. It's getting going right now off the U.S. West Coast. That's an upper level pocket of cold air or low pressure and spin, this big swirly twirl on the water vapor satellite. It's kind of the impetus for this storm system, but you'll notice it's still offshore, so we can't launch weather balloons into it. And so actually last night, the hurricane hunters, those folks who fly into hurricanes, flew into this storm to collect data to help us figure out what this thing's going to do. We pump that into models, and you can see just an absolute mess on the simulated radar.

Rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, the worst of everything from New Mexico, Texas, all the way to southern New England.

What does the forecast say about snowfall?

Where do we expect to see the most?

So I think the snow jackpot should be in roughly a 50 to 100 mile

wide zone north of the rain snow line. It starts near Oklahoma City, pushes northeast all the way

towards D.C., Baltimore, Philly, New York City, all those places have a roughly 50-50 shot of

seeing a foot or more of snow. Tulsa, probably 12 to 18 inches. Then southern Missouri, the boot heel, western Kentucky along the Ohio River, that's where the worst will be. But in addition to that, on the southern side, it's not just the snow, it's the sleet and the freezing rain, too. And what about the life-threatening cold? There's also threats of ice accumulation. Yeah, the ice accumulation is really what worries me the most, because for folks at home, ice happens when you have rain that essentially falls as a liquid

and then turns into ice on the ground given sub-freezing surface temperatures. You know,

in that freezing rain zone, temperatures might be in the mid-40s, a mile above the ground. So

liquid rain is going to fall, but the surface might be 25, 30 degrees.

So all that liquid freezes on the ground. Two main areas I'm really watching for the worst

ice accretion. I think northwestern Mississippi, northeast Louisiana, probably south of Memphis

along Interstate 55. That's the zone I'm really watching for potentially significant ice accretion.

We're talking like a half inch to an inch in spots.

And it only takes about a half inch of ice to pull down the power lines, get power outages. The roads

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