Central US gets a real taste of winter this weekend

Nov 08, 2025

Good Saturday morning, busy with some meteorological related activities this morning, but wanted to get a quick update out about a couple of weather stories.

Typhoon Fung-Wong continues to quickly intensify as it approaches the northern Philippines. The most recent advisory from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center earlier this morning showed Fung-Wong equivalent to a high end category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph. Automated satellite intensity estimates suggest that the typhoon has intensified significantly since then as the eye becomes warmer and clearer and very intense thunderstorm activity builds around the eye. It is likely that Fung-Wong is at least a category 3 equivalent storm at this point.

How intense Fung-Wong gets from here depends at least somewhat on how much interaction with land there is, as the farther south track that has evolved over the last few days means more interaction with islands in the northeast Philippines. Still, Fung-Wong should be at an intensity equivalent to a category 3 to 4 hurricane when it makes its main landfall on Luzon to the north of Manila in about 24 hours. Serious impacts from surge, rainfall and wind are anticipated in this region. After passing across Luzon, Fung-Wong will be weaker, but is still expected to cause heavy rain and strong winds as it passes across Taiwan early next week.

The central United States is getting an early taste of winter as the cold air outbreak we have been talking about the last couple of days starts to evolve (click here for more details from yesterday’s post). Snow and mixed precipitation will be fairly widespread today across the upper Midwest and Great Lakes, with heavy lake effect snow developing off of Lake Superior. Scattered showers and thunderstorms are expected in the southeast, with a few severe storms possible in the Carolinas and northern Georgia.

Note: The US weather community relies on the work of NOAA scientists who are exempt from the ongoing federal furlough due to the life-saving nature of their work. These federal employees are in their 39th day of working without pay and without knowing when they will eventually receive pay. You can read more about this situation in this post.