US post-holiday travelers can expect a mix of stormy weather this weekend, with blizzard conditions in New Mexico and western Texas, while flooding rain hits the southern plains from south Texas through Indiana, forecasters said on Saturday. The wet and snowy conditions come after a Christmas Day of unseasonable warmth on the East Coast, with record high temperatures set or tied in several cities including New York, while a tornado hit Alabama late on Friday afternoon, damaging several homes.
"It's going to be a pretty active weekend as far as winter weather," said Evan Duffey, meteorologist for AccuWeather. "It looks like it's going to be pretty bad across the southwest into the southern plains." Southern states were still cleaning up from tornadoes earlier this week that killed at least 15 people in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said on Friday that two people were still missing. The twister in Birmingham, Alabama, late on Friday afternoon damaged several homes, uprooted trees and caused a handful of minor injuries, police and weather officials reported.