New York has ordered drivers to stay off the road and shut down schools on Monday, while residents braced for a massive snowstorm hitting the northeast of the United States.

Tens of millions of Americans from the US capital, Washington, to the northern state of Maine have prepared for up to two feet of snow forecast in some areas.

The National Weather Service said on its website that light snow and freezing fog with lows of 30F were recorded in New York in the early hours of Monday morning.

NWS also predicted blizzard conditions would quickly materialise from Maryland up to southeastern New England, making travel extremely treacherous.

According to the Service, snow could fall at a rate of two to three inches per hour at the peak of the storm, with nearly 54 million people in its path.

Local reports have it that early Monday morning, the storm had already begun to hit New York, slashing visibility to the extent that the skyscrapers of Wall Street were barely visible from the adjacent borough of Brooklyn.

Power outages are likely due to heavy snow and strong wind gusts, forecasters said. Just after 01:39 am local time (0639 GMT) on Monday, nearly 80,000 customers were without power in the state of New Jersey, according to tracking website poweroutage.us.

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 flights have been cancelled, data from the tracker FlightAware showed early Monday.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said streets, highways, and bridges would be shut down from 9:00 pm Sunday until noon Monday in New York, which has more than eight million residents,

“New York City has not faced a storm of this scale in the last decade,” he said, explaining the state of emergency. “We are asking New Yorkers to avoid all nonessential travel.”

The ban will not apply to essential workers or New Yorkers needing to travel due to emergencies.

Brandon Smith, 33, who lives in Brooklyn, complained that some workplaces had remained open, even if roads were not.

“It’s gonna be difficult for most New Yorkers to get around because we still have to go to work. It’s unfortunate (roads) are suspended as jobs are not gonna stop calling us in,” he said.

Tourists, on the other hand, were delighted by the spectacle of their first experiences of snowfall.