A winter storm warning is in effect for Sunday — a blizzard warning for the Jersey Shore — and Sunday into Monday Philly’s snow has a shot at doubling the amount that fell on Jan. 25, the National Weather Service says.
“At this point, that’s certainly possible,” Zachary Cooper, meteorologist with the National Weather Service said Saturday. The official forecast is calling for just over a foot in the city, with the potential for the total reaching 18 inches.
Blizzard warnings up for the Shore, where onshore winds are forecast to howl past 35 mph, with moderate to major flooding possible.
While it wasn’t in the official language, the weather service on a Saturday morning might well have included a supermarket stampede warning.
The actual winter storm warning is in effect from 7 a.m. Sunday until 6 p.m. Monday.
Witha surprising level of agreement computer models and their interpreters Saturday were seeing the storm as being inevitable. It was forecast to affect the I-95 corridor from Washington to Boston — a rarity in recent winters.
The weather service listed a 25% chance that totals could approach two feet in the city.
“It’s going to be a long-duration event,” said Cody Snell, meteorologist with NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md.
On the plus side, this will not have the staying power of the 9.3 punitive inches that accumulated on Jan. 25 and spent a three-week vacation in the region. No ice is in the forecast, and daytime temperatures above freezing and the February sun likely will erase most it by the end of the workweek.
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What time would the snow begin in Philly?
Precipitation is expected to begin Sunday morning, said Snell, possibly as a mix of snow and rain that becomes all snow.
Snow may have a hard time sticking during the day, said Tom Kines, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., since temperatures will be near or slightly above freezing and the late-winter sun will be a factor, even it’s just a rumor in the sky.
Plus the ground won’t be especially cold after a Saturday in which the temperature may approach 50 degrees.
However, the upper air is going to be quite cold, Snell said, and when the snow is falling heavily, as it is expected to do Sunday night, “it will cool the column.”
He said areas that get caught in heavy snow “bands” would see the highest amounts.
What would be so different about this storm?
The storm is forecast to mature into a classic nor’easter, so named for the strong winds generated from the Northeast.
Nor’easters are the primary source of heavy snows along I-95, but the ones that produce heavy snow from Washington to Boston have been scarce lately.
“Over the past several years, they’ve been few and far between,” Kines.
The Jan. 25 storm was not a nor’easter per se, said Snell, but more of a case of the “overrunning” of warm air over cold air producing the snow and sleet.
John Gyakum, an atmospheric scientist at McGill University in Montreal and a winter storm specialist, said he anecdotally has seen a trend of coastal storms intensifying too far north to have much of an impact on the Philly region.
If that were the case, it could be a symptom of global warming, said Steve Decker, meteorology professor at Rutgers University. Storms form where cold and warm meet, and that may have been happening farther north lately.
In any event that evidently won’t be the case Sunday.
What could go wrong with the forecasts?
Are you new around here?
The storm consists of multiple moving parts, and as it bounds off the Southeast coast, it is due to intensify rapidly over the warm Atlantic waters.
Meteorologists advised it was still unclear precisely how intense it would become and what path it would take.
Forecast busts have been known to happen, including a famous one 25 years ago. On a Friday, the weather service warned of a storm of “historic” proportions to begin that Sunday.
What Philly got was about an inch of snow that fell over three uneventful hours.
In 2015, the head of the Mount Holly weather service office publicly apologized for a busted forecast.
However, in recent years, the region hasn’t had all that many serious snow scares.
In this case, expect details to jump around even as the precipitation is falling, but Snell said “confidence is growing” that substantial snow is going to happen.
Inquirer staff writer Stephen Stirling contributed to this article.
Whatever unfolds almost certainly won’t resemble what came down from the skies on Jan. 25 or its obstructive aftermath, but accumulating snow Sunday into Monday is looking more likely.
The National Weather Service on Friday listed a 90% chance of precipitation, with a 75% likelihood of two inches or more of snow for the immediate Philadelphia region, and about a one in three shot of at least six inches.
And add about a 100% chance of uncertainty regarding how this would play out, said Richard G. Bann, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, in College Park, Md.
Computer models continued to show a wide range of outcomes from a storm that was still two days away from developing, ranging from a gentle snowfall to a school and road closer. Expect differences to persist.
In addition to snow, a potent storm with powerful onshore winds could result in coastal flooding, the weather service office in Mount Holly advised.
“I don’t think we would jump to either end of the extremes,” Bann said, “but we can’t say anything is completely out of the realm of possibility just yet.”
The storm would evolve from multiple moving parts before maturing off the Southeast coast, he added. “Part of the equation is starting to come together but we’re still not there yet.”
By Saturday, he said, “hopefully we’ll kind of know what part of the chessboard we’re working on.”
When snow might begin in the Philly region
Timing issues are among those likely to be fine-tuned in the next couple of days, but the early thinking is that snow, or rain changing to snow, would arrive in the Philly region Sunday morning or in the afternoon, continuing into Monday.
The intensity of the snow and winds would depend on the strength of the storm, precisely where over the ocean it ripens, and the eventual track.
The U.S. model has been bullish on bringing it close enough for a major snowfall along I-95. The other models, not so much, but the weather service noted that one of the balkers, the European, had come on board with at least light accumulations for the region.
“We’re definitely going to be spinning up an area of low pressure,” Bann said, “but exactly what that means for D.C., Philly — any of us — is still in question.”
But on the plus side: No ice is expected in this go-round.
So much for the remnants of Jan. 25
One of the most-stubborn snowpacks in the period of record, which has mutated into one of the uglier snowpacks in the period of record, should be pretty much erased by the time any flakes start falling Sunday.
Submerged objects have been reappearing, evoking a surfacing submarine, and bare ground is becoming ever more visible.
A decent, soaking rain on Friday — perhaps double Philly’s month total so far, a mere 0.25 inches — and temperatures in the 40s, combined with a sunny Saturday with high near 50 degrees, should pretty well clear the yards. Those plowed-snow mountains are likely to survive a while longer.
The snowpack’s tenacity had everything to do with the two to three inches of sleet — melt-resistant white ice — that fell atop the several inches of snow on Jan. 25. The entire mess was locked in by an Arctic freeze.
Bann endured similar conditions in his area, and recalled that it was way harder to move out of the way than the Mid-Atlantic mega-snows of February 2010, when 35 to 45 inches accumulated.
He said he shoveled awhile, took a break, and then was astonished to see that his neighbors were finishing his work.
Asked if he sent them any thank-you gifts, he replied: “I haven’t stopped.”
STRAITS OF FLORIDA — At 2 a.m., oceanographer Ryan Smith was headed into his 12th hour of work with little sleep when trouble started.
From the rear deck of the University of Miami’s research boat, he guided the vessel’s winch to lower a cage containing 14 long, gray tubes, collectively weighing about 1,000 pounds, hundreds of meters deep into the Atlantic Ocean, to record the temperature, salinity and density of the water. But after running smoothly for the first two-thirds of the trip, the sensors now suddenly stopped transmitting data.
There was no time for a hiccup. With urgency mounting, Smith signaled to bring the cage to the surface.
At sea, there is no helpline to call for a broken instrument at this hour (or any hour). If the team couldn’t fix it, they would need to make a 12-hour slog back to Miami through the fast-moving Florida Current — the precise subject they were trying to measure.
For 43 years, scientists have been studying the strength of the water flow between Florida and the Bahamas to learn what drives its changes over time. The information could help scientists answer a pressing question: Is the Florida Current, one of the world’s fastest ocean currents, slowing down? If so, it could indicate weakening of the larger circulation system in the Atlantic Ocean — what scientists call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — which could be disastrous.
Even Hollywood has imagined the harm that could result from a collapse of this system of currents, which acts like a conveyor belt as it transports water, nutrients, and heat through the Atlantic.
While scientists doubt the scenario sketched out in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the AMOC’s failure prompts a calamitous ice age across the Northern Hemisphere, researchers say rain patterns could change or fail in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, disease may spread to new populations, and temperatures would probably drop across Western Europe. Iceland has even declared that the risk of such a collapse is a national security threat.
But climate scientists are at odds over how soon, or whether, the circulation system may weaken. Researchers largely agree that the AMOC may weaken over this century as the world warms, but they differ on whether the system is already slowing down.
Direct observations of the AMOC’s and the Florida Current’s flow, velocity, temperature and salinity could help clarify this. The Florida Current, which helps shuttle water north, is a key component in calculating the system’s strength.
Traveling between Miami and the Bahamas, a crew from the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration homed in on the Florida Current, the world’s longest nearly continuously observed ocean current. Over 36 sleep-deprived hours, six researchers and seven crew members traversed the ocean, dove underwater, and collected gigabytes of measurements. These expeditions gather data that generations of scientists can use to better understand the state of our oceans — and humanity’s future.
Tyler Christian, a marine scientist, takes a photo of a waterspout during a research trip to collect data on the Florida Current.
The AMOC debate
For more than four decades, scientists have almost continuously measured water flow across the Florida Current, largely with the help of a decommissioned AT&T telecommunications cable running from West Palm Beach to Grand Bahama Island.
The telephone line wasn’t intended for ocean research, but NOAA scientists noted that it picked up tiny voltages induced by seawater flowing across the Florida Straits, which changed depending on the current’s flow.Using direct measurements of the waterway from research cruises, scientists can convert the voltages into the volume of water carried each second through the strait.
In 2005, British oceanographer Harry Bryden tapped these cable measurements and the limited available ship measurements in a seminal paper that suggested a possible slowdown in the AMOC between 1957 and 2004. Using data across the Atlantic Basin today, scientists have found that the AMOC varies, daily and seasonally, yet it also appears to have experienced a slight weakening over the past two decades.
But is it on a long-term decline because of human-induced planetary warming? Debatable.
At about 4 a.m., oceanographer Denis Volkov, right, checks in on Jay Hooper, who helps the team with data management
The Florida Current is one of the main forces that make up the western boundary of the AMOC. The warm Florida waters feed into the mighty Gulf Stream, which merges with the warm North Atlantic Current headed toward Europe. As the current reaches the Arctic, air temperatures cool the water, which becomes denser. The water sinks and moves south toward the equator, where it is again warmed by the sun and returns north.
“The role of the AMOC in the climate is it carries a huge amount of heat from the equator towards the poles,” said Denis Volkov, who is a co-principal investigator of NOAA’s Western Boundary Time Series project along with Smith.
But scientists say a warming world is throwing off this balance. As Arctic ice melts, freshwater enters the North Atlantic — making the ocean water less dense, so it is less likely to sink. As a result, scientists propose thatit cannot power the ocean conveyor belt as well, so less salty, warm water is getting transported northward.
A major shift in the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation could create severe drought in some areas and damaging floods in others. Sea level could rise by a foot or more along the U.S. East Coast if it collapsed.
Scientists have typically used data that indirectly hints at the current’s movement — such as sea surface or air temperature — to reconstruct the oceans in models and track whether the overall system is weakening, but they have reached mixed conclusions.
For instance, a 2018 study plugged sea surface temperatures into computer models to show that the AMOC is weakening. Then, a paper released last January reported no evidence of weakening over the past 60 years after examining data on heat exchanges between the air and the ocean called air-sea fluxes.
The dive boat takes scientists to a site to collect data on the Florida Current.
Volkov and his colleagues are helping approach the puzzle with observations. In 2024, they reassessed the cable data from the Florida Current, adjustingfor changes from Earth’s geomagnetic field. First, they found that the current had remained stable over the past four decades. Then, they updated calculations of the AMOC in this region, which has been monitored for only 20 years or so, with the corrected data and found that the AMOC wasn’t weakening as much as previously calculated at this latitude.
“But there is a caveat that observational data is very short,” said Volkov. He said scientists would need another 20 years of AMOC observations to determine if the small decline is a robust feature and not part of natural variability.
And the AMOC can still weaken even if the Florida Current remains strong, he said, since it is the sum of currents across the basin. But long-term changes in the Florida Current can serve as an indicator of trouble for the rest of the system.
One snag, said Volkov: The serendipitous cable that provided data for more than 40 years malfunctioned in 2023 — perhaps broke. Until it’s fixed, researchers are ramping up their diving operations to recover data from underwater acoustic barometers on the ocean floor.
Volkov, left, and Smith watch as a sampling instrument drops into the water.
The expedition
When the research vessel departed from the university’s dock around 4 a.m. on Sept. 3, the sun and most of the science staff were down for the night. A few shipmates gazed at the illuminated cityscapes from the stern deck, next to the diesel engine’s deep rumble. After traversing rocking waves, the crew reached scenic Bahamian waters eight hours later.
The green F.G. Walton Smith, 96 feet long, and its crewmake this overnight trip about six times a year, traveling 93 nautical miles diagonally from Miami toward the Little Bahama Bank. From there, they go west and collect data at nine sites from the boat and dive underwater at two others.
The team’s goal is to determine the amount of water flowing north through the Florida Current per second through a series of underwater instruments, from the boat and from satellites. They also collect temperature, salinity, density and velocity data; velocity and temperature, for example, can be combined to calculate the amount of heat transported across an area.
Chomiak, left, and Zach Barton, a technician and engineer, return from diving to the seafloor to place a data-collection instrument.
At the first dive site, a remora — a long, torpedo-shaped suckerfish — circled the two scuba divers less than a mile from the boat. The slender fish is known for a unique fin on its head that suctions itself to sharks, whales, and turtles to feed off their detritus. And for a quick moment, it latched onto Leah Chomiak’s head. And her thigh.
Chomiak focused on the barometer in front of her. Her bulky gloves made it harder to use a screwdriver 50 feet below the Bahamian surface. She and her fellow diver held onto the long tubes that had been recording data every five minutes for the previous two months, since the last time divers brought the instruments to the surface and downloaded the data.
“Now we decided to service them more frequently, because, at the moment, this is the only source of data for our Florida Current transport estimates,” Volkov said. The scientists can use the pressure data to help calculate the amount of water flowing through the area.
Next, the ship arrived at the first of nine hydrographic stations andlowered a cage of sensors known as a CTD-rosette sampler (CTD stands for conductivity, temperature and depth, although it measures many more properties). Researchers can use the temperature and salt concentrations of a particular mass of water to infer where it came from and how it reaches other parts of the world.
Christian takes a quick nap in the galley as the vessel travels back to Miami.
Jay Hooper, who has been on these trips for 10 years and helps with data management, sat at the ship’scomputer station.
“Ready whenever you are,” he said into his headset.
From the top deck, the captain lowered the rosette into the water, dropping 60 meters each minute. As the instruments approached the bottom at 486 meters, Hooper said to slow down.
Lines of various colors — representing salinity, temperature, and density — squiggled down on Hooper’s computer screen as the sensors dropped. Temperature decreased and density increased as the instruments descended. Seventeen minutes later, the rosette was brought back onto the boat.
After hours of gathering data, Hooper and Smith hit a snag at the seventh station. The rosette now wasn’t sending any information to the computer. Was it human error? Did the instrument break?
The two tried different solutions as the other scientists slept. Then they replaced the sensors’ cable, andas they lowered the rosette, data filled the computer screen.
The boat stopped for the last dive near the Florida coast to retrieve the second set of underwater acoustic barometers. But the water was so cloudy, thick and green that the divers couldn’t see their hands, so they decided they would try on the next trip.
Captain John Cramer pilots the vessel back to the university.
For the next 12 hours, the boat fought against the Florida Current to take the crew home. Some aboard mustered up energy to sing “Happy Birthday” to one of the crew members.
The next morning, Smith and his colleagues processed the data to upload to NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory website. There were no notes about a cable malfunction, encounters with remoras or sleep deprivation.
The Excel spreadsheet had a single note for each station it recorded: “Profile looks good; use these data.”
You may have read this somewhere before: Computer models are seeing the potential for a significant winter storm to affect the Philly region on yet another weekend.
Those ingenious machines continue to predict that a storm will intensify off the Southeast coast Sunday into Monday. But “a large amount of uncertainty” remains about whether it will generate accumulating snow in the Philadelphia region, the National Weather Service said in its morning discussion Thursday. In the early going, areas south and east of Philly were the likeliest targets.
Based on past experience, not to mention the nonlinear chaos of the atmosphere, about the only thing certain was that they would be changing their stories multiple times in the next few days, as would their virtual peers.
In the short term, it is highly likely that, along with a certain dreariness, the region will be getting something that has been mighty scarce lately — rain. Philly’s rain total this month is under 15% of normal. Over the last 60 days throughout the region, it has been 40% to 50% below normal.
The forecast for the rest of the workweek in Philly
Our Trenton snow observer photographed these yesterday… inverse snow tracks! The snow was walked in when it was changing to sleet (ice pellets) back on January 25th, then the footprints filled up with sleet, and now the softer snow around them is melting faster than the sleet. pic.twitter.com/rLJvruzZrb
Atop the remnants, generally light winds have been aiding and abetting a rather stagnant air mass. A “code orange” air quality alert was in effect for South Jersey Thursday, and health officials advised those with respiratory conditions to limit outdoor exposure.
The primary irritants were tiny particulates, about 30 times smaller in diameter than a human hair.
Rain is likely to be in the air Thursday night into Friday, and it could be a substantial amount, on the order of a half-inch or more. So far this month, officially 0.25 inches have been measured at Philadelphia International Airport.
The moist air and the rain should erase more of the snowpack, “but we don’t want the snow and ice to melt too quickly,” said Ray Martin, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly. No significant flooding is expected, just some potential damage to footwear.
Temperatures are expected to top out in the 40s Thursday and Friday.
About the weekend storm potential
It may hit 50 degrees on Saturday with an appearance of the sun. So much for the easy part.
Come Sunday, “there could be some rain or snow,” said Matt Benz, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc.
A storm is due to slide across the South and eventually regroup off the Atlantic coast on Sunday.
But Benz pointed out that a key feature of the potential storm still was over the Pacific and not due to make landfall until sometime later Thursday, when it would be captured by land-based observation and give the machines a clearer idea of its intentions.
And it is not at all clear how much cold air would be available for snow, Benz said, but if the storm intensifies sufficiently, “it can manufacture its own cold.” Another factor is just where off the coast the storm would be when it matured.
In case you’re wondering why the atmosphere seems to pick on Sundays, having storms show up in seven-day cycles is a common phenomenon.
They often migrate in 3½-day cycles, which has to do with the rhythms of storm movements as they travel across the country, and it so happens that the more significant one has been arriving on the seventh day.
It keeps happening until it doesn’t, and it’s still very possible that it doesn’t this time around.
Officially* one of Philadelphia’s region’s most impressive and enduring snow-cover streaks in the period of record ended peacefully at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
After 23 consecutive days of at least an inch on the ground at Philadelphia International Airport, the National Weather Service observer reported a mere “trace” at 7 a.m. Tuesday, meaning that whatever was left was hardly worth a ruler’s time.
“I can’t imagine too many people are sad about this,” said Mike Silva, meteorologist at the weather service office in Mount Holly.
The news might have evoked vast choruses of “good riddance” were it not for the fact that mass quantities of the snow and ice remain throughout the region, enough to contribute to the formation of dense fog late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, the weather service warned.
And regarding that asterisk, observations at PHL have been known to differ from actual conditions elsewhere, if not common sense.
In the meantime, heaps of aging, graying plowed snow are ubiquitous around the great Philadelphia city-state. As for melting “those big mountains, that’s going to take forever,” Silva said.
For 18 days after 9.3 inches of snow and sleet was measured at the airport, the official snowpack had been 3 inches or more, the longest such streak in 65 years.
The 23-day run of an inch or more, which began on Jan. 25 when the snow started, was the longest since 2003.
The endurance had to do with the melt-resistant icy sleet that fell atop several inches of snow and the Arctic freeze that followed. Temperatures remained significantly below normal for 17 consecutive days.
The great melt is picking up steam in the Philly region
However, the melting process is at long last accelerating. Bare ground is appearing around tree roots, and evidence of vegetative life has been poking through the snow cover.
Temperatures above freezing and the February sun have been making hay, but so has the return of invisible atmospheric moisture, even as precipitation remains far below normal.
When warm, moist air comes in contact with snow, it condenses and yields latent heat that accelerates melting. That is evident in the swelling ranks of rivulets on driveways and in the streets.
The combination of the moisture, the cold snow and ice pack, and generally calm winds will result in fog that could reduce visibilities to a quarter mile at times. The weather service issued a dense fog advisory, in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Melting conditions should be excellent the rest of the workweek, with highs in the 40s and light rain possible Wednesday night, and likely on Friday.
Temperatures are due to remain above freezing into the weekend, but “then we’ll have to see what happens Sunday,” Silva said.
Another storm is due to develop in the Southeast, and expect another week of computer-model vacillation on whether it will produce rain, snow, or partly cloudy skies.
You may not have noticed, but that endless snowpack has developed a slow leak — in this case historically slow.
Its endurance continues to climb the charts among the snowpacks of yesteryear — and in at least one way may well be unprecedented in the period of record dating to the late 19th century.
As of 7 a.m. Friday, officially at Philadelphia International Airport, three inches of the snowy and icy remnants of what fell on the region on Jan. 25 had survived.
That made this the most-enduring snowpack of at least three inches in 65 years, said Alex Staarmann, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, the office’s climate specialist.
That earlier one, which lasted from Jan. 20 to Feb. 14, 1961, was replenished by multiple significant snowfalls, as did others at the top of the endurance list; the 2026 version was basically one-and-done after 9.3 inches were measured at the airport.
This one — and it still has its sparkle where it hasn’t mutated into frozen sludge — even has bested the snow cover attending the 44 inches that accumulated in a six-day period in February 2010, when at least four inches survived for 17 days.
The latest batch was at four inches for 18 days, good for fourth place all-time.
Not that it hasn’t had some aesthetic benefits. It can be like light therapy in the morning, and a spectacular screen for the tree shadows. It has beautifully entombed all that unfinished yard work.
Snow and ice debris is piled along the Camden waterfront in Camden, N.J., framing the Philadelphia skyline across the Delaware River, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026.
But it’s also been a royal pain throughout the region and begged the question: When it will go away?
When will bare ground emerge in the Philly region?
A farewell tour is likely next week as a snow threat for the holiday weekend remains a remote one, with accumulations only between “wet flakes” and “a dusting” possible, said Staarmann.
And you might keep an eye on Tuesday for a melt watch. Temperatures are forecast to fall below freezing Monday morning, and then stay above 32, even at night, through the workweek.
Highs are expected in the 40s Saturday through Monday, and then 50 or better the next three days.
More significantly for melting, the air will become noticeably more moist on Tuesday, and that should accelerate the melting. Your skin might even notice the difference.
Why has the snowpack been so enduring in Philly?
Since the precipitation ended on Jan. 25, the air has been remarkably dry, an underrated factor in the persistence of the ground cover, along with what happened after the snow stopped that day.
After more than seven inches of snow had fallen, it was topped with several hours of accumulating sleet.
Those miniature ice balls turned out to be a mighty additive: Ice may be way slower to accumulate, but it is also way slower to melt, giving the snowpack staying power.
“If we hadn’t had this much sleet, we might have some evidence of it, but it wouldn’t be this deep or persistent,” said Staarmann.
The Arctic freeze that followed and the consistently arid air have been the ideal preservatives.
Moist air, an efficient melter, has been absent.
When enough invisible water vapor comes in contact with snow and ice, it condenses and gives off latent heat that can liquefy the pack in a hurry.
After Philadelphia’s record 30.7-inch snowfall of Jan. 7-8, 1996, it was a moisture surge 11 days after the snow stopped that had a whole lot to do with erasing the snowpack even before the modest rains that followed, recalled David Robinson, the longtime New Jersey state climatologist.
The melt set off disruptive flooding, but even though rain is in the forecast for midweek, anything resembling a repeat is unlikely this time around.
Is that all there is for the winter of 2025-26?
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center on Friday had odds favoring above-normal temperatures through Feb. 23, followed by a possible cool down.
Regarding any potential for snow, “We still have a few weeks left of opportunities,” said Staarmann.
As long as computers are operating, snow chances will never die.
However, the February sun is getting stronger by the day and lasting longer. If it does snow again, it’s a near certainty that it won’t match this one for staying power.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the most aggressive move by the Republican president to roll back climate regulations.
The rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The Obama-era finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.
The repeal eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities, experts say. Legal challenges are near certain.
President Donald Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history, by far,” while EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the endangerment finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.”
Trump called the endangerment finding “one of the greatest scams in history,” claiming falsely that it “had no basis in fact” or law. “On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world,” Trump said at a White House ceremony, although scientists across the globe agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are driving catastrophic heat waves and storms, droughts and sea level rise.
Environmental groups described the move as the single biggest attack in U.S. history against federal authority to address climate change. Evidence backing up the endangerment finding has only grown stronger in the 17 years since it was approved, they said.
“This action will only lead to more climate pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harms for American families,” said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, adding that the consequences would be felt on Americans’ health, property values, water supply and more.
The EPA also said it will propose a two-year delay to a Biden-era rule restricting greenhouse gas emissions by cars and light trucks. And the agency will end incentives for automakers who install automatic start-stop ignition systems in their vehicles. The device is intended to reduce emissions, but Zeldin said “everyone hates” it.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman who was tapped by Trump to lead EPA last year, has criticized his predecessors in Democratic administrations, saying that in the name of tackling climate change, they were “willing to bankrupt the country.”
The endangerment finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy, including the American auto industry,” Zeldin said. “The Obama and Biden administrations used it to steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”
The endangerment finding and the regulations based on it “didn’t just regulate emissions, it regulated and targeted the American dream. And now the endangerment finding is hereby eliminated,” Zeldin said.
Supreme Court has upheld the endangerment finding
The Supreme Court ruled in a 2007 case that planet-warming greenhouse gases, caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Since the high court’s decision, in a case known as Massachusetts v. EPA, courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the endangerment finding, including a 2023 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The endangerment finding is widely considered the legal foundation that underpins a series of regulations intended to protect against threats made increasingly severe by climate change. That includes deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.
Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator who served as White House climate adviser in the Biden administration, called the Trump administration’s actions reckless. “This EPA would rather spend its time in court working for the fossil fuel industry than protecting us from pollution and the escalating impacts of climate change,” she said.
Former President Barack Obama said on X that repeal of the endangerment finding will make Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”
Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician and executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, said Trump’s action “prioritizes the profits of big oil and gas companies and polluters over clean air and water” and children’s health.
“As a result of this repeal, I’m going to see more sick kids come into the Emergency Department having asthma attacks and more babies born prematurely,” she said in a statement. “My colleagues will see more heart attacks and cancer in their patients.”
David Doniger, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump and Zeldin are trying to use repeal of the finding as a “kill shot’’ that would allow the administration to make nearly all climate regulations invalid. The repeal could erase current limits on greenhouse gas pollution from cars, factories, power plants and other sources and could hinder future administrations from imposing rules to address global warming.
The EPA action follows an executive order from Trump that directed the agency to submit a report on “the legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding. Conservatives and some congressional Republicans have long sought to undo what they consider overly restrictive and economically damaging rules to limit greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Withdrawing the endangerment finding “is the most important step taken by the Trump administration so far to return to energy and economic sanity,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who has questioned the science behind climate change.
Tailpipe emission limits targeted
Zeldin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have moved to drastically scale back limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Rules imposed under Democratic President Joe Biden were intended to encourage U.S. automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
The Trump administration announced a proposal in December to weaken vehicle mileage rules for the auto industry, loosening regulatory pressure on automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and trucks. The EPA said its two-year delay to a Biden-era rule on greenhouse gas emissions by cars and light trucks will give the agency time to develop a plan that better reflects the reality of slower EV sales, while promoting consumer choice and lowering prices.
Environmental groups said the plan would keep polluting, gas-burning cars and trucks on U.S. roads for years to come, threatening the health of millions of Americans, particularly children and the elderly.
Robert E. Booth Jr., 80, of Gladwyne, renowned pioneering knee surgeon, former head of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Pennsylvania Hospital, celebrated antiquarian, professor, researcher, writer, lecturer, athlete, mentor, and volunteer, died Thursday, Jan. 15, of complications from cancer at his home.
Born in Philadelphia and reared in Haddonfield, Dr. Booth was a top honors student at Haddonfield Memorial High School, Princeton University, and what is now the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He was good at seeing things differently and went on to design new artificial knee joint implants and improved surgical instruments, serve as chief of orthopedics at Pennsylvania Hospital, and mentor celebrated surgical staffs at Jefferson Health, Aria Health, and Penn Medicine.
He joined with two other prominent doctors to cofound the 3B orthopedic private practice in the late 1990s and, over 50 years until recently, performed more than 50,000 knee replacements, more than anyone, according to several sources. Last March 26, he did five knee replacements on his 80th birthday.
In a tribute, fellow physician Alex Vaccaro, president of Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, said: “He restored mobility to thousands, pairing unmatched technical mastery with a compassion that patients never forgot.”
In a 1989 story about his career, Dr. Booth told The Inquirer: “It’s so much fun and so gratifying and so rewarding to see what it means to these people. You don’t see that in the operating room. You see that in the follow-ups. That’s the fun of being a surgeon.”
Dr. Booth was also praised for his organization and collaboration in the operating room. “His OR was a clinic in team work and efficiency,” a former colleague said on LinkedIn.
He told Medical Economics magazine in 2015: “I love fixing things. I like the mechanics and the positivity of something assembled and fixed.”
This article about Dr. Booth’s practice was published in The Inquirer in 2015.
His procedural innovations reduced infection rates and increased success rates. They were scrutinized in case studies by Harvard University and others, and replicated by colleagues around the world. Some of the instruments he redesigned, such as the Booth retractor, bear his name.
He was president of the Illinois-based Knee Society in the early 2000s and earned its 2026 lifetime achievement award. In an Instagram post, colleagues there called him “one of the most influential leaders in the history of knee arthroplasty.”
He was a professor of orthopedics at Penn’s school of medicine, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and the old Allegheny University of Health Sciences. He loved language and studied poetry on a scholarship in England after Princeton and before medical school at Penn. He told his family that his greatest professional satisfaction was using both his “manual and linguistic skills.”
He was onetime president of the International Spine Study Group and volunteered with the nonprofit Operation Walk Denver to provide free surgical care for severe arthritis patients in Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. Colleagues at Operation Walk Denver noted his “remarkable spirit, profound expertise, and unwavering commitment” in a Facebook tribute.
This story about Dr. Booth’s charitable work abroad appeared in The Inquirer in 2020.
At home, Dr. Booth and his wife, Kathy, amassed an extensive collection of Shaker and Pennsylvania German folk art. They curated five notable exhibitions at the Philadelphia Antiques Show and were recognized as exceptional collectors in 2011 by the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks.
He lectured widely about art and antiques, and wrote articles for Magazine Antiques and other publications. He was president of the American Folk Art Society and active at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire.
“He was larger than life for sure,” said his daughter, Courtney.
Robert Emrey Booth Jr. was born March 26, 1945, in Philadelphia. He was the salutatorian of his senior class and ran track and field at Haddonfield High School.
Dr. Booth enjoyed time with his family.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Princeton in 1967, won a letter on the swimming and diving team, and played on the school’s Ivy League championship lacrosse team as a senior. He wrote his senior thesis about poet William Butler Yeats and returned to Philadelphia from England at the suggestion of his father, a prominent radiologist, to become a doctor. He graduated from Penn’s medical school in 1972.
“I always liked the intellectual side of medicine,” he told Medical Economics. “And once I got to see the clinical side, I was pretty well hooked.”
He met Kathy Plummer at a wedding, and they married in 1972 and had a daughter, Courtney, and sons Robert and Thomas. They lived in Society Hill, Haddonfield, and Gladwyne.
Dr. Booth liked to ski and play golf. He was an avid reader and enjoyed time with his family on Lake Kezar in Lovell, Maine.
“He was quite the person, quite the partner, and quite the husband,” his wife said, “and I’m so proud of what we built together.”
Dr. Booth and his wife, Kathy, married in 1972.
In addition to his wife and children, Dr. Booth is survived by six grandchildren and other relatives.
A private celebration of his life is to be held later.
Donations in his name may be made to Operation Walk Denver, 950 E. Harvard Ave., Suite 230, Denver, Colo. 80210.
That inert, frozen mass that has turned parking and walking and the routine business of life into punitive experiences around here is a certifiable Philadelphia rarity.
It almost certainly will take a significant hit this week — temperature readings may reach the big 4-0 (hold the applause; a downside is possible) — but the snowpack already has earned historic status in Philly’s weather annals.
The official snow depth at Philadelphia International Airport at 7 a.m. Monday was 5 inches, the 15th consecutive day that it has weighed in at 5 inches or more.
The staying power of the other snow-cover streaks at the top of the list were the results of heavy snow followed by additional snowfall of 10 inches or more that replenished the snow pack. That list includes the 44 inches that fell in a six-day period in February 2010.
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This time around, only 0.3 inches have been measured since the 9.3 inches of snow and white ice stopped falling on Jan. 25.
The sleet that fell atop the several inches of snow added considerable durability to the pack, since ice melts more slowly than snow, and then it all was rock-frozen by a memorable arctic freeze, followed by reinforcements.
Temperatures the last 15 days have averaged 10 to 15 degrees below normal, and Sunday’s low of 8 was the coldest of the season to date.
It isn’t often that the Philadelphia region experiences such “magnitude … and persistence” of cold, said Kyle Imhoff, the Pennsylvania state climatologist. Plus, typically big snows are followed by a thawing period of few days later. What’s happened since Jan. 25, he said, “is a much rarer occurrence.”
The cumulative effects have been evident along the Schuylkill, which is looking (deceptively) fit for skating, and the Delaware River navigation channel. The river and most of Delaware Bay are between 90% and 99% ice covered, the U.S. National Ice Center reported Monday.
It hasn’t been just us. Data pulled by Samantha Borisoff, climatologist at the Northeast Regional Climate Center, showed impressive snow-cover endurance streaks in Wilmington, Atlantic City, Washington, and New York.
Ice cover throughout the Mid-Atlantic region expanded Sunday, said ice center physical scientist Jonathan Edwards-Opperman. While Saturday was harsher with winds gusting past 50 mph and below-zero windchills from midmorning on in Philly, the “strong winds pushed a lot of the existing ice into the shore, which exposed open water,” he said.
Ice levels along Midatlantic waterways on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026.
When the gusts backed off Sunday, the ice went to town. “We saw rapid new growth,” he said.
Said PhilaPort spokesperson Ryan Mulvey, “Talking with people around the port we haven’t seen ice like this in over 10 years.”
That said, however, he added that the Coast Guard has kept the traffic moving and “we have not experienced any ice-related delays.”
It is about to get better
It did not get to freezing Monday afternoon, but it should make it to the upper 30s, or perhaps the low 40s by midweek, said Amanda Lee, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.
And daytime highs should go above 32 at least through the workweek. That combined with the growing power of the February sun — its daily wattage will be about 10% higher on Tuesday than it was on Feb. 1, according to NASA — should lessen the snow and ice cover considerably.
That thaw, however, could come with some bumps in the road.
“I think it’s fair to expect potholes to grow or develop as the weather gets warmer,” said PennDot spokesperson Helen Reinbrecht. Patching crews will be out there, conditions, permitting, she said.
Those conditions should persist at least until the weekend, when another storm could affect the region, said Lee.
It’s only Monday, which means the computers still have several more days of disputation.
In the meantime, you may not be seeing much in the way of bare ground, but expect an outbreak of puddles. It’s been a while.
Steve Frates of Ocean View, N.J., was driving along Route 9 in Cape May County on a recent bitter cold day and noticed something strange: dead robins lying by the side of the road.
Lots of them.
Frates was even more startled when one flew into his Ford F-150 and died. The 72-year-old retired telecommunications manager wondered what was happening.
“I noticed when it was really cold that I would see flocks of birds alongside of the road as I was traveling up and down Route 9 and the Garden State Parkway,” Frates said. “I would see a lot of birds that had been hit. I’d never seen anything at that scale. This was at a level I’ve never experienced before.”
The winter has been hard on the region’s animals, wiping out 95% of the woodcocks in Cape May Point, fostering frostbite on opossums in Philadelphia, and freezing turtles in place in ponds.
Experts say the animals are well adapted to survive the cold, but this winter has been especially harsh, producing a frozen snowpack that keeps animals from digging for food, and a prolonged cold that has pushed some to the brink.
About 200 woodcocks have died in the area of Cape May Point since the Jan. 25 snowfall that froze under a prolonged cold spell. These were found likely seeking food near the edge of homes.
Woodcocks are starving
Mike Lanzone, a wildlife biologist and CEO of Cellular Tracking Technologies, has been busy the last two weeks helping to gather hundreds of dead woodcocks in Cape May Point and West Cape May. His company makes products that track birds via GPS and other technology.
He described a devastating die-off for the woodcocks, which depend on finding food by probing the ground to extract worms and invertebrates. They have been unable to penetrate the snow and ice, causing starvation.
“They were losing a lot of muscle mass, and they weren’t able to eat anything,” Lanzone said. “We started seeing them die off. First it was just a few. Then 10. Then 15. Then 40. Then almost 100 woodcocks.”
Lanzone said about 254 woodcocks had died as of Thursday.
“There was at least a 90-95% die-off,” he said. “That is what we know for sure. At least in Cape May Point and West Cape May.”
Lanzone said the woodcocks were being taken to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia to be examined.
Jason D. Weckstein, associate curator of ornithology at the academy, said such die-offs have happened before. He will examine the birds and, using chemical signatures in their bodies, determine where they were born.
“They’re dying because they’re starving,” Weckstein said. “They can’t feed. Most of those birds were super emaciated and just died.”
Robins are desperate
Chris Neff, a spokesperson for New Jersey Audubon, said the robins that Frates saw along the side of the road had been driven there in search of food.
“Birds are congregating along the melted edges of roads searching for bare ground on which to find food and even meltwater to drink,“ Neff said. ”Birds are desperate to consume enough calories each day during this extreme weather, and this makes them bolder, meaning they may not fly off when a car approaches if they have found something to eat.”
American robins, he said, travel in large flocks. When their food is exhausted, a few will take off in search of the berries of American holly and Eastern red cedar. The rest will follow en masse, followinga path that might lead them across a road.
The chances of collisions with cars become much higher.
Neff advises that people should slow down if they see birds congregating along a road and keep an eye out for any that might fly across.
“Like deer,” Neff said, ”if one darts across the road, there are sure to be more following.”
A grebe that was rescued amid the harsh winter weather and taken to the Wildlife Clinic at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, where it is being fed and cared for until an open water source can be found for it to be released.
Opossums and other animals
Sydney Glisan, director of wildlife rehabilitation for the Wildlife Clinic at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Northwest Philadelphia, characterizes the severe winter conditions as a critical “make it or not” period for local wildlife.
Some animals, such as deer, are well adapted to the cold and can eat fibrous bark and twigs to survive. Other species, however, struggle.
She said Virginia opossums found in Philadelphia, despite being a native species, have physical attributes that “do not really work for this type of weather.” She has treated multiple opossums for frostbite. The latest patient arrived Friday.
They are susceptible, she said, because their ears, tails, and paws have no fur for protection. Often, tails or fingers need to be amputated.
Residents often find them curled up and immobile, mistakenly believing the animals are dead when they are actually just trying to stay warm or are in a state of shock.
The weather also affects aquatic birds like grebes, which become stranded on land because they require open water to take off and cannot walk well on ice or ground.
Even squirrels struggle, as the ice prevents them from digging up cached food, Glisan said.
Glisan advises the public to be cautious about intervening for wildlife such as birds. She notes that even well-intentioned acts, such as providing heated birdbaths, can result in hypothermia if a bird’s wet feathers subsequently freeze in the air.
“As much as it might sound rude, I always say doing nothing is the best thing that you can do,” Glisan said. “I recommend helping by not helping.”
Reptiles and amphibians
Susan Slawinski, a wildlife biologist at the Schuylkill Center, said the danger for reptiles and amphibians comes as lakes and ponds freeze over. Aquatic species such as green frogs, painted turtles, and snapping turtles overwinter at the bottom of ponds.
There, the animals survive by slowing their metabolisms enough to eliminate the need to eat or surface for air. However, prolonged cold poses a specific danger as ponds freeze solid to the bottom. Those hibernating will perish.
The Schuylkill Center uses a bubbler in its Fire Pond to maintain a gap in the ice to let in oxygen.
Despite the risks, Slawinski emphasizes that native wildlife is historically resilient, though mortality is an unfortunate reality for animals that select poor hibernation spots.
For example,thegray tree frog uses glucose to create a natural “antifreeze” that prevents its cell walls from bursting in freezing temperatures.
“Native wildlife is very good at adapting to cold temperatures,” Slawinski said. “There have been colder winters, longer winters before. Unfortunately, there is always going to be a mortality risk.”
