‘Frozen’ iguanas fall from trees in Florida as record cold arrives

(CNN) — Record cold temperatures have pushed as far south as Florida this morning as wind-whipped snow continues to pile up in the eastern Great Lakes from a brief bout of Arctic air gripping the eastern US.

More than two dozen cities, reaching as far south as Fort Myers and Naples, Florida, toppled or tied daily record lows for November 11.

This morning is the coldest so early in the fall since 1976 in Jacksonville, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia, with both locations dropping to a shivering 28 degrees. Even Miami flirted with a record low, coming up one degree short at 49 degrees.

The cold is causing South Florida’s cold-blooded iguanas to “freeze,” or lose muscle control. They can sometimes fall out of trees as a result, which some Floridians saw Tuesday morning. The iguanas are not dead, but rather in a paralyzed state and can revive if temperatures warm up fast enough.

Cold conditions farther north have kicked the lake-effect snow machine into gear across the Great Lakes for the first time this year. Snow will contribute to dangerous travel conditions on Tuesday in the snow belts of northeast Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania and western New York.

The heaviest snow has come to an end in the western Great Lakes. Up to a foot of snow fell more than 50 miles south of Chicago, and totals north of the city from far northeast Illinois into southeast Wisconsin topped 10 inches. Dangerous travel conditions from snow and strong winds were reported early Monday along Interstate 57 south of Chicago in Kankakee and northern Iroquois counties in Illinois, the National Weather Service said.

Chicago only picked up 1 to 3 inches of snow, which was accompanied by thunder and strong winds Sunday night into early Monday. Forecasts for the city on Sunday called for potentially historic November snow totals over 10 inches, but the heaviest bands of snow spared the downtown area from those kinds of totals.

Lake-effect snow totals often swing wildly from location to location depending on where heavier bands develop because of how narrow they are. That’s what happened Monday near Lake Michigan.

Elsewhere, over a foot of snow fell in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northwest Indiana from Sunday into Monday.

Several inches of snow have also piled up in the Appalachians from West Virginia to the border between North Carolina and Tennessee since Monday. Knoxville, Tennessee, saw its earliest accumulating snow since 1996 on Monday, according to the National Weather Service. Snowflakes have flown through the air as far south as the Atlanta metro area on Monday, and along the North Carolina coast in Wilmington on Tuesday morning.

The good news: The cold snap won’t stick around long. Temperatures across the central US rebound quickly on Tuesday, and most of the East warms up again on Wednesday and Thursday.

A few cities in the Midwest that just saw their first snowflakes of the season could flirt with daily record high temperatures on Saturday. That includes Dubuque, Iowa, and Rockford, Illinois, where thermometers are predicted to soar to near 70 degrees as the weekend begins.