The widespread winter weather is the result of a “large arctic air mass” that swooped into the U.S. from Canada, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
 
That air mass will be shuttling multiple storm systems across the country this week, with nearly all Americans “experiencing some form of notable weather,” said NWS’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md.
 
Heavy snow was blanketing the West on Wednesday, with total accumulation expected to climb to up to 2 feet in most of the region’s mountain ranges, the forecast predicted.  
 
Meanwhile, moderate to heavy rain and some thunderstorms are expected to move from the Pacific Northwest to California on Thursday.
 
Much of the Midwest was coping with potential blizzard and possible whiteout conditions on Wednesday, the NWS said.

• Snow totals expected to approach 2 feet in southern Minnesota.
   
• The forecasters warned that travel could become “treacherous to impossible.”  
  
  
• Scattered power outages could leave areas without electricity or heat. 

Snow will likely settle into the Interior Northeast and New England late Wednesday, with about 4 to 8 inches accumulating in Upstate New York by Thursday, the meteorologists stated.

Yet while much of the country copes with winter weather hazards, the Southeast will be sweating, as “anomalous warm temperatures” bake the region, according to the weather service.

Highs on Wednesday and Thursday will climb to the 70s and 80s from the Southern Plains east into the Southeast, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.  

Highs will be particularly unusual in the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic on Thursday — soaring more than 40 degrees above seasonal averages to “feel more like June than February.” 

In New Orleans, where celebrants are enjoying Mardi Gras, temperatures climbed to 83 degrees, tying 1932 and 1917 for the warmest Mardi Gras on record. 

Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Supporting early-stage energy research taking shape across the U.S. will be critical to solving the big, unanswered questions that plague America’s renewable sector, a federal agency chief told The Hill.  

“We often look at where are the white spaces — are there things that we can do that will make the most impact in the energy space?” said Evelyn Wang, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Her agency’s goal is to get ideas from “the proof-of-concept stage to something polished enough for investors — or other government incubators” to then pick up “and get closer to deployment.”

Here are three big problems Wang hopes to solve at the agency:

1. Bringing grids underground: Burying electric transmission lines would help protect cities from outages caused by extreme weather — but doing so is expensive and comes with new risks.

• It’s “very dangerous because of the high voltages,” Wang said. “Can we have that imagine a world by which this could be fully autonomous?” 
   
• The hardest and most dangerous part of that job is connecting the cables together at their junctions, Wang said. She described a potential future in which robots would pull wire through a new system of underground conduits. 

   

• Underlying it all is an economic question, she said: “What’s the cost point that will make it commercially viable?”  

2. Keeping the ocean’s carbon books: Investors see enormous potential for the ocean and its connected ecosystems to suck down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — slowing global heating while making money for whoever can track those carbon credits.

• But carbon markets require reliable carbon tracking — something that has lagged in oceanic carbon capture. ARPA-E’s SEA-CO2 project seeks to bring new rigor to tracking how much carbon is actually being stored in these projects. 

   

• Wang framed this as an audit of sorts. “There’s been a lot of discussions about these various marine carbon dioxide removal techniques — but actually, how well are these technologies doing?” she said.

3. Finding the cleanest path: The freight industry accounts for 8 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions as it moves goods across a complex network of ships, buses and trains, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But much of these emissions are avoidable, according to Wang.  

• ARPA-E is funding research to ensure that goods are taking advantage of the most efficient pathways across roads, rails and waterways — which Wang said would also help route goods around disruptions caused by extreme weather.  

   

• “As we think about this, there is an opportunity to ask: how can we quickly redirect now the different modes of transport to now still enable the supplies that you need?” she said.