A "humongous" and deadly winter storm is spreading across the US Midwest, with freezing rain and heavy snow causing road and air transport chaos¹.

一场“巨大无比的”致命暴风雪席卷美国中西部地区，冻雨和大雪使公路、航空运输陷入混乱。

The storm is expected to cause widespread disruption

The worst of the storm is expected to hit late on Thursday and dump up to 2ft (61 cm) of snow by Christmas Day.

Icy roads were blamed for the deaths of 12 motorists驾车旅行的人, mostly in Nebraska, Kansas and Arizona. Some 100 flights leaving Minneapolis were cancelled.

The US East Coast is still recovering from last weekend's record snowfall.

Tens of thousands of people in West Virginia and Virginia are still without power.

The National Weather Service国家气象局 (NWS) issued blizzard²暴风雪 warnings early on Thursday for Kansas and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and the Texas panhandle.

"There's just a humongous巨大无比的，极大的 storm moving across the centre of the country, basically from the Canadian border to Texas and spreading from west Colorado to Illinois," Pat Slattery, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, told AFP news agency.

"We would recommend that people if at all possible postpone³ their travel plans just to be on the safe side," he said. "This is not a storm to be messed with."

He said freezing rain and high winds was making driving extremely dangerous.

The NWS winter storm warning for South Dakota said it was a "life-threatening system".

In Louisiana where powerful thunderstorms struck, the death of one man was blamed on high winds after a tree fell on his home.

The latest storm began in the south-west on Tuesday, causing blizzard-like conditions and travel chaos, before spreading to the east and north.

Meteorologist Scott Blair warned that gusts阵风，狂风 would reach 40 mph (64 km/h) in central Kansas, and that "blowing snow" would greatly reduce visibility.

South of the storm system, heavy thunderstorms will produce flooding across Texas and into the Ohio Valley, forecasters warned.

More than 1,300 customers were without power in Iowa with temperatures hovering⁵ around freezing on Thursday, the Iowa Association of Electric Co-operatives said.

The governor of South Dakota issued a state of emergency even before the storm hit, and urged residents to stay off不接近 the roads until the storm passed.

Flights at Chicago's two main airports were running on schedule, officials said, after the storm forced the cancellation⁶ of more than 260 flights on Wednesday.

Nearly 100 flights from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport were cancelled on Thursday with dozens of cancellations.

The Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City shut down one of its three runways and cancelled nearly 30 flights, while at Houston's Hobby Airport there were two-hour delays.