chad myers looking -- hopefully not too many delays, 6,188 planes in the sky. >> that's a good number for you. >> that's a good number. some people arriving and even earlier. >> love it. >> and it will tell you that it's going to take five hours to get to l.a. and that's because they think about a jet stream to slow you down. a head wind to slow you down. if there's no wind in the central part of the united states, the west flight from new york to l.a. there are the planes. a bunch of them here. they are all going to hawaii. that's the only delay that i have seen all day. there is going to be rain across the south. it's not going to be a white christmas. only slight flurries. and the blizzard in new mexico is a disaster i-10 and i-40 closed across parts of mexico. >> not necessarily many airport delays but new mexico, not at all fun. >> that's right. >> chad myers, thank you. >>> still ahead, for months and months now it's been the government versus protesters. but now suicide bombers unleashing terror in syria. some say it looks like the work of al qaeda. >>> plus, a man is so drunk

. >>> next, chad myers is in the weather center. chad, fall creating havoc in new orleans. people losing their lives. >> visibility down to a quarter mile. your lights are on, this is what happened, the fog burned off. the interstate closed for many hours near new orleans. look at that mess. people couldn't see the cars stopping ahead of them. it almost looks like an icy wreck that you would expect like in michigan or witness witness. >> it does. >> wear people couldn't stop because the brakes didn't work. but when you can't see and you're still driving fast, the brakes didn't work either, because they weren't putting them on. your visibility was up 3 miles down to a quarter mile in less than 100 feet. that's what happened there. what else is happening now? a little bit of light snow in parts of michigan and ohio as well. this snow will get a little more significant on sunday for the midwest. a big rain event. and even snow above 2000 feet. anywhere from northern california right on up to the cascades and the olympics. we're going to see 25 inches of snow above 5,000 feet o

. >>> and chad myers is all over the destruction in los angeles.ext. [ male announcer ] sorry, buddy. truth is, nyquil doesn't un-stuff your nose. what? [ male announcer ] it doesn't have a decongestant. really? [ male announcer ] you need a more complete cold formula, like alka-seltzer plus liquid gels. it's specially formulated to fight your worst cold symptoms, plus relieve your stuffy nose. [ deep breath ] thank you! [ male announcer ] you're welcome. that's the cold truth! [ male announcer ] alka-seltzer plus liquid gels. ♪ oh what a relief it is! ♪ >>> so we have to keep talking about these santa ana winds for a second straight day. these powerful winds hammered southern california, also utah, arizona with gusts of winds in some places up to 140 miles an hour. folks, that is stronger than some hurricane forces. winds are smashing cars and knocking down power lines. chad myers, you and i have been talking about this for the last couple of days. tell me if the winds are dying down. >> today they are. 20 to 30. and mainly in the mountains. malib

. >> chad myers, one of your fellow -- >> great man.ring it on. >> he said in one of the 12 years i've been here at cnn this is one of the best if not the best travel weekends for christmas that i've seen. he said people have it pretty good. no big issues. >> he's right. he really is. other than texas, there's nothing else people can't handle. >> i was trooith to get you to disagree. >> no. take a look at this. this is parts of -- this is albuquerque. look at the snow coming through. it's not just snowflakes. a lot of it is tiny rain drops when he hits the surface. obviously, someone was successful getting through there, but we have had a lot of accidents. we can see more of those. west texas is one of the places where you can have some trouble. perfect scenario where you are a large vehicle, big ee cono line van. still, really no contest. and you love this shot, don't you? >> well, the guy -- you said this usually doesn't work by gassing it on the ice, but it worked out for him this time. >> you think so? watch this. come on. boom, wow

>> chad myers, thank you for that. that's if for today's reporter roulette. politics now. newt gingrich's poll numbers aren't the only thing dropping. tears were falling from his eyes today. what was the question that got the tears rolling at a town hall forum in iowa today? >>> four days left until the caucuses. our team is on the ground. we'll have a live report and we'll explain. >>> plus, some call it animal abuse. investigators raid a turkey farm in north carolina. we're going to talk to a police officer about what's going on behind closed doors. >>> and in l.a., police think they may have an arsonist at work. 19 fires, 19 were set overnight. >>> and a riddle for you. what does kelly clarkson have to do with the race for the republican nomination for president? she got herself into a little bit of trouble on twitter. we'll explain later this hour. forty years ago, he wasn't worried about retirement. he'd yet to hear of mutual funds, iras, or annuities. back then, he had something more important to do. he wasn't focused on his future but fortunately, somebody else was.

we're going to talk to chad myers.those pictures in the weather center very closely. we'll talk to him in a moment. >>> first, here is a question for you. what were the most popular topics on twitter for the past year? to find the answer, tally the hash tags. trending p topics. number 8, january 25th, the date that became synonymous with the reform movement in egypt. number 7, super bowl. sports fans tweet a lot we've noticed. next, the phrase i'm proud to say, tnumber 5 japan which quickly started to trend after the earthquake and tsunami this past february. in fourth place, i don't understand why, as in hash tag i don't understand why you're not tweeting me right now. so what are the top three trending topics of the year 2011? think about it, the answer after this. beer!" ♪ ♪ but the second that she shut the door ♪ ♪ girl started blowing up their credit score ♪ ♪ she bought a pizza party for the whole dorm floor ♪ ♪ hundred pounds of makeup at the makeup store ♪ ♪ and a ticket down to spring break in mexico ♪ ♪ but h

chad myers.some media in syria are describing two suicide car bombs that killed at least 30 people there. we're talking about an act of terrorism in syria. we have a live report for you straight ahead. >>> plus, a little later in the show, this devastation here says the philippines has many rushing to help. that story is coming up. with roc®retinol and antioxidants. lines, wrinkles, and sun damage will fade. roc multi-correxion. correct what ages you. nice, huh? yeah. you know what else is nice is all the savings you can get on cruze and traverse over there. oh! that's my beard. [ chuckles ] it's amazing. ♪ [ male announcer ] this holiday, chevy's giving more. now very well qualified lessees can sign and drive a 2012 cruze ls for around $199 a month. ♪ you'd do that for me? really? yeah, i'd like that. who are you talking to? uh, it's jake from state farm. sounds like a really good deal. jake from state farm at three in the morning. who is this? it's jake from state farm. what are you wearing, ja

chad myers with the answers. hi, chad. is it going to be tough?wet than white surprisingly. we'll have a wet christmas in a lot of the northeastern states, even here in georgia. could pick up a couple inches of rain. tornado watches and warnings are in effect. tornado warnings. doppler indicated potential tornadoes. another one that was just issued for parts of mississippi. you say how can there be tornadoes, it's wintertime, the first day of winter? well, because it's so warm down here. birmingham, montgomery, temperatures almost 70 degrees. the sun popping out. big storms are back off to the west. it's part of the next system because there are cold, cold parts of the country and warm parts of the country separated by a significant jet stream. the jet stream does this, that allows the cold air to come down from the north. as the jet stream goes up over here, that allows the warm air to infiltrate the southeastern part of the u.s. it's very warm. very wet outside. the humidity is very high. even airports are getting a little bit slow. not seeing a

we've got chad myers standing by but i want to bring matt in as well. me -- good to see you. walk me through some of your pictures and walk me through the damage. how bad was it? >> it was pretty bad. i mean, we were getting sustained winds between 60 and upwards of 80 miles per hour all through the night and morning. the grounds keeper curator guy at the mission got an alert around 2:00 in the morning of some movement. he showed up at the church and found out that the crucifix was knocked down by the gale-force winds. >> how long have you lived there and have you ever seen anything like this before? >> i grew up in the midwest and i've experienced tornadoes all my life. i've lived in los angeles for almost 15 years and this has never happened in my time in los angeles. it caught a lot of people off guard of how strong the santa ana wind event was. >> matt hartman, thank you for your pictures. chad myers, thank you as well. next, this. it really was an historic moment in baghdad today. handing camp victory over to iraq. >>> plus, wolf blitzer in d.c. fo

>> for the most part meteorologist chad myers mentioning the other day it has been an incredibly quiet holiday travel time. you know he's absolutely right. that's the case. there's only one bad spot around the nation that's an eyesore in terms of travel weather and that is in the beloved state of texas. i love you but the weather is tough. scattered showers along i-35 corridor in houston, some rain there, too. take a look at this. in west texas it's all switching over to snowfall. some could give you whiteout conditions on parts of i-20. zoom in a little more south of lubbock and towards amarillo and abilene -- amarillo is here, abilene closer as we venture in a little more. high elevations in odessa and midland. that's where the snow is heavier. even then only a few inches of snowfall. all things again relative in the rockies. the snow there, inches. snowfall fell several feet within boulder, several hours ago. a lot of die out. this is the snowpack that remains. also snow on the ground in parts of the northeast and western great lakes. as we fast forward into tonight what we anticipa

. >> you be careful,ed chad myers. thank you very much. that's reporter roulette for this monday. >>> still ahead, a republican changes his mind on a tough immigration law. a woman sees this on facebook, quote, someone call 911 three dead bodies. >> i kind of freaked out when i seen it. i was wondering if this is true or fake. >> after a man changed his status update on facebook, a horrific discovery. >>> newt gingrich sounds like a broken record about the listen kwon/douglass debate. he's about to get his wish less than an hour from now. >>> shoppers who had items on layaway suddenly don't have to pay for it. they're getting it for free. wait until you hear why. stay right here. >>> if it is interesting and happening right now, you're about to see it. rapid fire. beginning with the markets, let's take a quick look at the numbers on the big board. i can tell you the dow still down over the 200 mark, 218 points as we're just 50 minutes away from the closing bell. as we watch the numbers, a lot of the numbers are down because of the growing

chad myers has the getaway forecast. where do you need to get away from, chad? >> need to get away from parts of new mexico, john. finally, though, in the past hour, i-40 has opened back up through new mexico and i-10. i can't tell you the last time i've ever heard of i-10 being closed because of snow. i-10, this is mexico. this is southern new mexico and arizona right here in el paso. you showed the pictures earlier. that's where the trouble was this morning. i-25 is still shut down for another couple of hours till they get the plows out. where is it going to be a white christmas? not very many spots. you have to go to the mountains, be up here. if you're going to be skiing in the cascades, good stuff, good snow. the sierra going okay. but colorado and utah, really good snow. even the ski resorts in arizona. it's green in michigan. maybe a little bit brown in some spots. but no white christmas across parts of the northeast. not expecting any snowfall to come down. still some here in parts of west texas. but you'd expect a big swath of snow for santa across the

next on reporter roulette, let's to go chad myers who has a pretty stunning look at the future of the warfare. i've looked at these images. it is kind of wild. >> it is. the number one trending topic. we know about these vertical landing and takeoff planes. number one we'll talk about a disk rotor. the disks here, the flying disk becomes, sinks in. we have a jet that takes off. goes faster. becomes a plane. kind of a cool thing. this is a as a resulture. this is the coolest one, i think. this is a robot. but they are making compounds that can be solid or liquid, depending if it wants to go around or through or under a door. these little legs can be hard and they can move around or they can actually be a little mouse. they can evolve and go into places where solid pieces would not be able to get to. this is something cool. like a land system. if you're going into battle and obviously you don't have the right cell towers. you can throw these outside the humvees and they become your cell towers for you. they're i-robots. they can foul. this we've had on tv. remember this? didn't work. tw

chad myers watching winter storms. tornado warnings. let's start with the tornado warnings. >> the cold air is trying to push away the warm air. the warm air is here. birmingham to tallahassee, a hot day today. it could be 75 in some spots. the cold air wants to come in from behind it. you get to birmingham and baton rouge all the way to memphis. the temperatures will go down 30 degrees as the cold front goes by. you push the warm air away. it has to go up. it can't just go backwards. the rising air makes tornadoes. now alabama, the biggest threat right now for a tornado on the ground. the biggest tornado warning that i can put my finger on to this point. something else will happen tonight. tens of thousands of people will try to fly through atlanta's hartfield jackson airport. planes come in, planes go out. wherever urg going through, you go through the southeast. with this weather coming through atlanta in the next few hours, some planes won't make it in. some planes are not going to make the out. your plane may make it out but your c

chad myers is joining us with more on this vital waterway. t at stake here. >> certainly and the distance between oman and the south coast of iran, about 32 miles. now, we're talking about the distance wolf, for you, niagra on the lake and toronto. we're talking about the width of lake ontario. that's all we have to move all of these ships through this strait. so, as we come through here, the yellow line is the board between the u.a.e. oman and up to iran. this is the disputed area because they're kind of close. we have islands so close, there's your 32-mile distance as the ships come in this way and go out this way. now, right around this point, not such a big deal because i'll show you. go to the shipping lanes. they're in the oman waters. shipping lanes here, six miles across, two miles going this way, two miles going out and a two-mile median so the ships don't bump into each other. but as we go farther up the gulf, this water down here is very shallow. ships can't go through the waters here of the uae oman, they come across and are right

chad myers is taking a closer look.ing on. >> there was a mass ejection kind of like a solar flare, and it slows plasma out into space. it even hit part of the earth. we felt we had some aurora borealis not that many days ago. but here it is when it hit mercury and there's this big fluff of plasma heads towards mercury and when it gets there, it finds that little object and many think that may be an alien spaceship going around mercury, but we've debunked that theory. it looks something like a spaceship. you can maybe see dr. spock in there, but not really. this is not what it seems. this is an image of a, phantom image of what the computers and how the computers block out other stars. on a regular day, you would see many, many stars. there would be so many stars on this map you would never see that plasma coming by. so what the computer program does through nasa, it takes all of those bright white spots, if it sees it in two passes, it blacks them out. so you see one if you take a picture here, another image here, if b

chad myers, we're talking temperatures, what, that are 20 below zero or so? how bad is it. >> yeah.ill is blowing out there. this is the first of a couple that will affect the midwest. one will affect chicago on sunday. the good news is for all of you going to the ball drop in new york city, temperatures there for this weekend for saturday night when anderson cooper, we'll be there having a party, about 42 degrees at ball drop time. that's fantastic compared to where we've been sometimes this time of year. some cloud cover. slight snow showers across parts of michigan. the next story is how much rain will come on shore. rain all the way up and down from northern california. the connection all the way back to hawaii. we call it the pineapple express. flurries across parts of the midwest. cool in the southeast although a lot of bowl games will be going on. 5500 airplanes in the sky right now, randi. most on time. a couple of delays, houston. that just went away. i imagine there's a little bit of lingering, five or ten minutes. san francisco, 1:05 minutes. i don't see any significant b

top of the hour, let's talk about something that a lot of you are talking about and let's go to chad myerst. the greater del kong region. >> yes. >> let's go to the elvis monkey. >> the issue is, it has no nose. literally, no nose. there is just a hole there, right straight into the sinuses of this new mammal we found. 145 plants, 28 reptiles, 25 fish, seven am fine generals and a bird they found. take a look at this. this is the eldest monkey. the next thing, the gerkin fish. >> and a great looking little bird. >> that was the only bird they found. they found them easier, quicker. nothing hiding here. something else that i've found very cool, how about ants that feed plants. and this is called the picture plant. this is the cycle lick gecko. that's a picture plant. and it has a very sweet smell on the inside. just like a fly trap, it will close up and devour a real thing inside of it. is is a carve nif rouse plant. >> and then the frog you can't see. >> where is it? >> it's right in the middle of the picture. you can see the back from right to left or left to right. >> and i can't see the

chad myers, obviously, snow expected this time of year as i had to be reminded this morning.s winter. today is the first day of winter. let's talk about the tornado warnings in alabama. that is odd. >> it is very odd. we've had spring tornadoes forever. everybody knows about the spring tornado season, tornado alley. but there is also a secondary tornado season, especially across the deep south where we are now. alabama, mississippi and georgia. that happens in the fall. did you go outside today? it's muggy out there. it feels like you're in central florida in the middle of spring time. that's the spring time weather that will be pushed away by the cold air. when cold air slides under warm air, like a hot-air balloon going up. the storms go up as well. they are from birmingham all the way to mobile. ashby right there. that would be the biggest part of the circulation that i can find right now. we'll get a little bit tighter. here's birmingham and tuscaloosa. you did have a warning earlier. there were sirens going off but that storm stopped rotating so they did reduce it to jus

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i want to ask our own chad myers about this.he lag time between those warnings that folks got and then when that stage collapsed. is that typical? how did that actually happen where they just had three minutes? >> the warning went out ten minutes ahead. there was some type of a lag between when the weather service put out the warning and when the announcement was put out. at that point in time the winds were coming down the grandstand. there seems to be a funneling effect. the warning was for that county. it was for this area. i think although it's going to take seven deaths to get this fixed, this won't happen again. people will realize that these stages are temporary facilities. they're not made to withstand hurricane force winds. when that warning was put out, even to the people in the stands, i listened word for word, we are going to continue the concert. don't worry. get out of the way. that was three minutes ahead. you can't get rid of that many people that were sitting there. that's a racetrack where they were sitting. th

can they avoid them though, chad myers? some you can't avoid. this is colorado. digging out from a major storm there. in some cases you just can't avoid it, can you? >> if you're trying to get on i-10 to new mexico, they're canceled. at this point in time you're sitting waiting for the interstates to open them. they're plowing them but they're closed. we had snow in boulder, all the way up and down i-25. for a while it was difficult in colorado. now it's also closed in new mexico. they're having a very difficult time. the department of transportation is not on twitter, facebook, they don't have a great website. we're trying to call them. they're not answering their phone. they're busy trying to get the roads clear. it's still snowing, t.j. you have to take this. a lot of people, i mean, from houston, from dallas take i-10 across to their loved ones in santa fe, into phoenix. all the way from albuquerque down. that's the trouble spot. there will be other trouble spots but it will be more wet than white. this will be a wet christmas in a lot of the southeast and ev