Blizzard bears down on New York, Boston

WASHINGTON - New York and Boston were being hit Sunday by the first blizzard of the season as a snow storm moves out of the South and brings a belated white Christmas to much of the East Coast.

Even before the first flake fell, airlines Saturday - Christmas Day - were offering to re-book flights at no cost for holiday travellers wanting to depart earlier than planned.

By Sunday, airlines started grounding hundreds of flights. Delta airlines alone had cancelled 800 flights, CNN reported.

More than 30 centimetres of snow and blinding blizzard conditions were predicted for New York City and New England, the private forecaster AccuWeather said. Winds are expected to exceed 65 km per hour.

The weather system is the same storm that dumped a week of rain, snow, flooding and mud streams on California and throughout the US West and mid-West starting in mid-December.

It then travelled to the US South and delivered the first white Christmas in more than 100 years to places like Atlanta, Georgia, slathering traffic chaos among drivers and road departments unaccustomed to snow.