A Real-Time Map of Travelers Getting Screwed By the Thanksgiving Storm

This is where the misery was located as of 3PM Tuesday.

The sky has decided to barf up a hodgepodge of snow, ice, sleet, rain, and racing winds all over the US this week, just in time to ruin everyone’s trip on the busiest travel day of the year, which is tomorrow.

Travel officials expect about 3 million people to venture by plane to their turkey dinner, and already hundreds of flights have been canceled and thousands delayed—including more than a third of routes at the major airport hub in Dallas, which will have a ripple effect down through the airline system as thwarted passengers try to hop on other flights.

The annual clusterfuck apparently inspired flight-tracking site FlightAware to develop an interactive “Misery Map” visualizing flight statuses in real-time and the megastorm traversing the country simultaneously. Because who doesn’t love a little data viz schadenfreude?

The storm is doling out its misery relatively evenly across the US this time around—though Americans in the mountains and rural New York and Pennsylvania will get the benefit of snow over the holiday while the rest of us can look forward to biting wind, power outages, and icy roads. According to the Weather Channel, the nor’easter will affect about 58 million people over 2.5 million square miles by the time it lets up on Thanksgiving.

via NOAA

We can blame the unfortunate timing of Thanksgiving Stormgate 2013 on two separate systems that are about to link up. Nasty weather heading East from California, dumping snow along the Rockies and painting the South with ice, and another storm that’s moving down from the Great Lakes, will hook up to deliver the Northeast with flurries, freezing rain, and winds as high as 60mph.

That means airfaring folk heading to or from New York, DC, Philly, and Boston are all expected to get hit during peak travel. As of now, according to the map of misery, the most doleful travelers are currently trapped at airports in Atlanta, Denver, Charlotte, and Dallas.