seems a little odd that the black kid are there with a white santa. it s all good. to each his own. you was scared of santa. he s got the cutest things. you can t really see my phone. there s a black santa and white santa stocking that we found. ryan, you re the best. thank you. cnn this morning continues right now. so glad that you could join us this morning on the eve before the eve of christmas. good morning, everyone. poppy and kaitlan are off and i m here with the lovely and smart and talented sara seidner. i was wondering where you were going with that but you re good. we re going to catch you up on the five big stories this morning. more than half the population is under winter storm and wind chill alerts as a major storm moves across the country. it s not like a snow day when you were a kid. this is serious stuff. please take this storm extremely seriously. more than 820,000 power customers are in the dark, thousands of flights have been cancel
coastal communities are among the worst hit, as this image from christchurch in dorset shows. lots of trees blocking roads. our reporter danjohnson is in st helier injersey and a short time ago sent us this update. it is absolutely battering these silence relentlessly overnight. some people have had a really rough night. i have been said one of the hotels where people have been evacuated. around a0 people have had to be moved from their homes. windows have been smashed, roofs have been ripped off, there were hailstones at one point in the early hours of the morning. rows have been blocked across jersey. hours of the morning. rows have been blocked acrossjersey. my hours of the morning. rows have been blocked across jersey. my roads. there are no flights whatsoever. commercial flights at least. and there are no flights whatsoever. commercialflights at least. and no boat services out there. that has caused some concern. authorities have said to people there will be abl
been very damaging storm, unusually well forecast in this case. all the various computer models that we tend to look at from europe and america in the uk met office, they all seem to be telling the same story with the same sort of placement of this low pressure system and the intensity of it. usually, there is a bit of uncertainty, different models telling a different story, taking it on a different track. different timings etc. we try and find the line of best fit that we can give the best forecast. in this case it was quite easy because they all sang from the same hymn sheet. when i started to show its face about five or six days ago. mccain started. so that enabled us to pass on the message to people to make the right kind of plans, he can t stop the weather from doing what it does but you can be ready for it and get the message out there. so it s been a blessing in that respect. find message out there. so it s been a blessing in that respect. and there was this red
local flooding, downed tree, downed power lines. and we could see this could be a multi-day event. not just for this west coast of florida. but in northern sections of florida into georgia, also coastally south carolina where my beloved state of south carolina could be impacted and charleston, in particular, where summer thunderstorm floods the city there. there you can see the computer model the next five days suggesting four to six to some isolated areas of as much as ten inches of rainfall. as i mentioned the computer models are in fairly good agreement. remember, any kind of change, whether 50 miles, could dramatically change where the system makes landfall. by landfall we mean when that eye crosses the shore and that s what we refer to as landfall. guess it would have to make the landfall for the impacts to really be felt across the region. as we go towards saturday, it will be off the midatlantic
right now we ve got a lot of rain and high winds across parts of the northeast, possibly taking power out and also causing major delays as far as the air traffic system goes. it sounded like a summer thunderstorm in new york this morning and the roads are slick. so it s going to be pretty dangerous out there to drive or walk. can you put this into context for us? we always have a very bad habit in the news business of saying this is the worst storm ever. how does this storm stack up with storms of the past? it s very interesting, it s like fingerprint, no one day is exactly a like. however, this system has similarities to a major blizzard that happened in 1978. over 40 years ago we had a cyclone that caused problems. the forecasts were not great and it gives you an idea of how far