Parts of Midwest to see their first significant snowfalls of the season

“It is going to be a very tough travel day”, said National Weather Service meteorologist Bruce Terry. Enlarge Elisha Page/AP A snow plow heads heads down a street Friday in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Chicago’s O’Hare worldwide Airport had 7.1 inches of snow by noon Saturday, which forced the cancellation of about 350 flights in and out of the busy airport, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com. Marengo is about 65 miles northwest of Chicago.

Hope Peterson, 22, and Alex Cutler, 24, both of Sioux Falls, shovel the sidewalk in front of Cutler’s parents’ house during the first snow of the season Friday, November 20, 2015, in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Meanwhile, northern IL was under a winter storm warning, with six to 10 inches of snow expected.

Snow before Thanksgiving is not uncommon in the Midwest, Terry said, but Saturday’s early snow levels are noteworthy: Southeastern South Dakota got 18 inches overnight, while parts of Iowa and IL woke up to more than a foot.

Between 5 and 8 inches of snow had fallen on far northern IN and southern MI by Saturday afternoon, with accumulations growing ever-smaller farther to the south, the weather service said.

The storm is moving east and will last through this evening, when it tails through MI, Richard Otto, lead forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, said.

The storm is expected to continue across parts of the Midwest and Great Lakes on Saturday, mainly hitting parts of IL, Wisconsin, MI and Upstate NY, according to the weather service. The weather service says its records show two previous big snowfalls in November in Chicago: 8 inches on Nov. 6, 1951, and 7.5 inches on Nov. 26, 1975. Midway worldwide Airport had canceled about 175 flights. It’s unusual for the area’s first snowfall of the season to dump more than 6 inches, Seeley said.

In central and eastern Iowa, road conditions were deteriorating around the state Friday evening as they became covered in snow or ice.

“There’s got to be at least five, six inches, if not more”, North Sioux Falls resident Chris Jones said.

“Some of those amounts are pretty impressive for this time of year”, he added.

Southern South Dakota saw significant snowfall and poor traveling conditions Friday morning, with a foot or more of snow expected.