joining us now is nbc news meteorologist bill cairns. bill, what is the latest at this hour? >> well, melissa we are watching this storm maturing, if we want to call it that. it is growing into intensity. now it is becoming a full-fledged blizzard. in the last hour, about 50,000 people have lost power. and we're going to continue to add to that number to the hundreds of thousands throughout the overnight. that's the worst part of this. losing power in the middle of a winter storm when you don't know how long it's going to be until the power crews can a, get through two or three feet of snow to turn your power back on. let me show you a cool image of the storm. this is the imagery i show you during hurricane season. it almost looks like a hurricane. the spinning l is where the center of the storm is, now just south of massachusetts and cape cod. and the way it works is all of the warm air gets sucked into the storm. and on the back side, all the cold air comes in behind it. and that's what we're seeing now in areas where it's actually snowing down towards philadelphia for the first time. the white on the map shows you where it's snowing.