Dry Beijing barely gets any winter precipitation, making this year's Winter Games the first to rely almost entirely on artificial snow. Organizers are touting the event's green credentials, but experts do worry about the environmental impact of such a massive snowmaking operation given the huge amounts of water and electricity it takes.

At Yanqing north of Beijing, where organizers built the alpine ski venue from scratch, the slopes stand out as ribbons of white contrasting starkly against the surrounding brown hillsides. Snowmakers have also been deployed farther north in Zhangjiakou, which is hosting freestyle skiing, ski jumping and biathlon.

All of it is the product of months of snowmaking using sophisticated European equipment.

Here's a closer look at the Olympic snowmaking operation:

HOW IT WORKS

Natural snow is formed high up in the clouds when water vapor molecules cling to tiny particles like pollen or dust. In scientific lingo, these specks are dubbed nucleators. They create a snow nucleus that then attracts more water molecules to form snowflakes.

Snowmaking equipment tries to duplicate this process, artificially, by spraying atomized water into the air along with mechanically created nucleators -- tiny ice crystals — that act as seeds for the manufactured snowflakes. This process has been around for decades: simulated snow was first used at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

SNOW GUNS

TechnoAlpin won the bid to supply the Beijing games with snowmaking equipment, a contract worth $22 million.

The Italian company has blanketed the slopes with 272 snowmaking fan guns and another 82 stick “lances” to produce “technical snow” for the Winter Olympics skiing and snowboarding venues. They're all hooked up to a system of high pressure pumps and pipes that carry water chilled by cooling towers up the slopes.

TechnoAlpin's fan guns resemble small jet engines or oversized hair dryers, with nozzles spraying either atomized water or ice crystals mounted around the edge of a turbine. The guns, which can be aimed remotely using Bluetooth, blast the mixture dozens of meters into the air to cover broad downhill slopes.

“And while it’s falling to the ground, snow is created,” said Michael Mayr, TechnoAlpin's China sales manager.

Snow lances, meanwhile, are up to 10 meters tall and don't have fans, instead using gravity to carry the snowmaking mixture to the ground, making it a bit more like natural snowfall.

WATER WORRIES

Beijing and Zhanghiakou are both not far from the Gobi Desert and are “highly water stressed," China Water Risk, a Hong Kong-based consultancy, said in a 2019 report.

The International Olympic Committee even noted the issue in its own 2015 evaluation of Beijing’s bid, saying the two districts “have minimal annual snowfall” and that the Winter Games would have to rely completely on fake snow.

The “Beijing – Zhangjiakou area is becoming increasingly arid” because of climate change and other factors, the IOC said, adding that Beijing's bid “underestimated the amount of water" needed for snowmaking.

The Winter Games are expected to use 49 million gallons of water, the equivalent of 74 Olympic swimming pools, to make snow.

SUSTAINABILITY

The IOC now says snowmaking in Beijing was developed “to high technical and environmental standards."

“The regions where the snow sport events will be held are constantly very cold," the IOC said in a statement. “This allows a very efficient snow production and does not require the constant reproduction of snow," like ski resorts elsewhere with fluctuating temperatures that cause snowmelt.

Snowmaking can raise other environmental concerns, including over the chemicals sometimes used to help water freeze at higher temperatures, and the electricity needed to power the systems, which could mean a bigger carbon footprint. The IOC says all venues and facilities are powered by wind and solar energy and that no chemicals are used because of the region's cold temperatures.

“Of course we are using a lot of energy of making snow,” Bernhard Russi, chairman of the International Ski Federation's alpine committee, said at a press briefing Saturday. But he added that the challenge is how to store the snow over the summer for the next season - something already being done in Europe, allowing resorts to save up to half of it.

WHAT THE ATHLETES SAY

Athletes have voiced their concerns about competing on fake snow, saying it brings new risks.

Skiers and experts say manmade snow has more moisture, which means it ices up faster. Estonian Olympic biathlete Johanna Taliharm told the AP last month that artificial snow is “faster and more dangerous" because of the icing.

Russi, the 1972 downhill gold medalist in Japan, acknowledged that “of course ski racers and we organizers, we prefer to have natural snow,” but added that using machines to make snow allows them to get it to the right “hardness” for each discipline.

The IOC said artificial snow is used regularly at World Cup ski competitions and denied that it makes courses more dangerous,. "To the contrary, it creates a more consistent surface from the top to bottom, or start to finish, of a course. "

As the Winter Games begin, Russi said “the snow we find right now on the courses is absolutely perfect, you cannot have it better."

It was the kind of jaw-dropping performance the crowd had never seen.

Zeb Powell stole the show at the 2020 X Games in Aspen, Colorado, jumping and flipping his way right into fans' hearts and a first-place win.

But here's the thing, the rookie clutching the gold medal didn't even like snowboarding the first time he tried it.

"My teacher was mean, and she set me up backward. None of it was appealing to me," Powell tells Newsy. 

For a while, he turned to skateboard, but his raw talent on the snow could not be ignored.

"He's always been flipping and turning, and he's always been on a board or something that will let him fly through the air," Valerie Powell, Zeb's mother, said. 

His parents, who adopted him at five weeks old, started sending him from his North Carolina home to a snowboarding camp in Colorado. Powell stood out in a sport that traditionally is as white as snow.

Newsy's Clayton Sandell: How many people were there doing this that looks like you?

Powell: There might have been one other black person on the mountain.

Sandell: You ever feel unwelcome in this sport?

Powell: Luckily, like, no. I don't really have anything bad to say about anyone.

But it isn't just that Zeb Powell is one of the few black faces on the slopes. Sports commentator Selema Masekela has watched generations of snowboarders over three decades. He says the 22-year-old has game-changing skills he's never seen before.

"He's a jazz musician on a snowboard. He improvises.  It's like, oh, this is a type of snowboarding, an ability and an interpretation of the thing that is crazy, and so artistic and spontaneous, but highly athletic. And also, in the body of a young black kid who grew up in North Carolina?" sports commentator Selema Masekela tells Newsy. 

Powell's first appearance at the X Games changed everything. He gained a ton of new followers and support on social media. Fans who maybe, for the first time, saw themselves.

"I heard a lot of them say they didn't even know that black people snowboarded, which is crazy. I mean, just coming from me, like I never even thought about it like that," Powell explained.  

Powell is still getting used to all the attention and all the selfies.

Sandell: What's it like being recognized like that? 

Powel: That's always crazy. I just kind of fully embrace it try to talk to everyone.

But one thing he's sure of, he's using his new visibility to help make snowboarding much more diverse.

"I think the culture is just it's so fun to be around. I love it. I think a lot of people will love it," Powell says. 

Inviting as many as he can to a sport that historically hasn't been very inviting.

"Recreating and luxuriating in the outdoors was sort of one of the last safe spaces that were built mostly specifically for white people on the back end of segregation in this country.  And so, it's going to take a very long time for those things to change," Masekela explains further. 

Powell didn't place at this year's X Games, but his mom says what's important is that her son knows he has a gift.

"And you got to use it right and stay humble and give back, and so far, that's what he's done, which makes me extremely proud. Prouder than any medal he could ever win," Valerie Powell says of her son. 

"It's exciting because he really does have an opportunity to be so much bigger than then snowboarding and to be like an icon for the sport in opening up accessibility and possibility to what the slopes can look like. It's like, you know, growing up watching Jordan or Kobe or Serena, and then to see it come along, in in a young Black man in America is just it just wildly powerful," Masekela says. 

For now, Powell says he'll be spreading the word through the type of videos he makes with his friends, hot-dogging down the slopes and dropping into concrete canyons, making sure that even though he's one of the few Black pro snowboarders, Zeb Powell is not going to be the last.

Clayton Sandell at Newsy first reported this story.

CHICAGO —

A major winter storm that already cut electric power to about 350,000 homes and businesses from Texas to the Ohio Valley was set to leave Pennsylvania and New England glazed in ice and smothered in snow Friday, forecasters said.

A foot of snow was expected to accumulate in northern New York and northern New England, but it was the ice that threatened to wreak havoc on travel and electric service in the Northeast before the storm heads out to sea late Friday and Saturday, said Rick Otto, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.

“Snow is a lot easier to plow than ice,” he said.

Even after the storm pushes off to sea late Friday and Saturday, ice and snow were expected to linger through the weekend because of subfreezing temperatures, Otto said.

About 350,000 homes and businesses lost power from Texas to Ohio on Thursday as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines, part of a winter storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the Midwest and brought rare measurable snowfall and hundreds of power outages to parts of Texas.

The highest totals of power outages blamed on icy or downed power lines were concentrated in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio, but the path of the storm stretched further from the South and Northeast on Thursday. Several schools and universities across the region closed on Friday as a result of poor weather conditions.

Along the warmer side of the storm, strong thunderstorms capable of damaging wind gusts and tornadoes were possible Thursday in parts of Mississippi and Alabama, the Storm Prediction Center said.

In western Alabama, a tornado that hit a rural area Thursday afternoon killed one person, a female he found under rubble, and critically injured three others. A home was heavily damaged.

Tornadoes in the winter are unusual but possible, and scientists have said the atmospheric conditions needed to cause a tornado have intensified as the planet warms.

Heavy snow the storm brought to Midwestern states isn't unusual, except the bigger-than-normal path of intense snow in some places, said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. With a warmer climate, people are forgetting what a Midwestern winter had long been like, he said.

"The only amazing winters I've been able to experience is through my parents' photographs of the 1970s," Gensini, who is 35, said. "This (storm) is par for the course, not only for the past, but winters current."

More than 20 inches of snow was reported in the southern Rockies, while more than a foot of snow fell in areas of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.

The flight-tracking service FlightAware.com showed more than 9,000 flights in the U.S. scheduled for Thursday or Friday had been canceled, on top of more than 2,000 cancellations Wednesday as the storm began.

"Unfortunately, we are looking at enough ice accumulations that we will be looking at significant travel impacts," Orrison said.

At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, an American Airlines hub, an estimated 700 customers stayed Wednesday night in its terminals, according to an airport statement. Airport personnel provided pillows, blankets, diapers and infant formula to the marooned travelers. Airport officials said in the same statement that on Thursday night "we are ready to provide assistance in anticipation of customers who may need to stay in the terminals."

The Ohio Valley was especially affected Thursday, with 211 flight cancellations at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport on Thursday. An airport spokeswoman told the Cincinnati Enquirer that all flights were canceled Thursday except for Delta Air Lines and American Airlines flights before noon.

Nearly all Thursday afternoon and evening flights were canceled at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, and Friday flights could be as well, spokeswoman Natalie Chaudoin told the Louisville Courier-Journal. UPS suspended some operations Thursday at its Worldport hub at the airport, a rare move.

Almost 300,000 homes and businesses were still without power as night fell Thursday, most of them in Tennessee and Ohio, according to the website poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. As night fell Thursday, almost 150,000 Tennessee customers were without power, including about 135,000 in the Memphis area alone — or one-third of the customers of Memphis Light, Gas & Water.

Power restoration could take days, said Gale Carson, the utility's spokeswoman. "It's not going to be a quick process," she said.

Six people were taken to a hospital after a 16-vehicle crash on a Memphis highway. Two were in critical condition when taken to an emergency room after the crash on Austin Peay Highway, the Memphis Fire Department said on Twitter. Four others suffered non-critical injuries.

Trees sagged under the weight of ice in Memphis, resulting in fallen tree limbs and branches. Parked cars had a layer of ice on them and authorities in several communities around the city warned of some cars sliding off slick roadways.

Meantime, almost 70,000 were without power in Ohio, with large percentages of the population in southeastern Ohio in the dark.

In Texas, the return of subfreezing weather brought heightened anxiety nearly a year after February 2021's catastrophic freeze that buckled the state's power grid for days, leading to hundreds of deaths in one of the worst blackouts in U.S. history.

Facing a new test of Texas' grid, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to get through the storm. Texas had about 70,000 outages by Thursday morning, nowhere close to the 4 million outages reported in 2021. About half had their power restored by evening.

Abbott and local officials said Thursday's outages were due to high winds or icy and downed transmission lines, not grid failures.

In Dallas, where snow rarely accumulates, the overnight mix of snow and freezing rain had hardened Thursday afternoon into an icy slick that made roads perilous.

South Bend, Indiana, reported a record snowfall for the date on Wednesday with 11.2 inches, eclipsing the previous record of 8 inches set on the date in 1908, said Hannah Carpenter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's office in Syracuse, Indiana.

Once the storm pushes through, she said temperatures will see a big drop, with Friday's highs mostly in the upper teens followed by lows in the single digits in northern Indiana, along with bone-chilling wind chills.

"It's definitely not going to be melting real quick here," Carpenter said Thursday morning.

The frigid temperatures settled into areas after the snowy weather, with Kansas residents awakening to dangerous wind chills of around 15 below zero. In New Mexico, schools and nonessential government services were closed in some areas Thursday because of icy and snow-packed roads.

The disruptive storm began Tuesday and moved across the central U.S. on Wednesday's Groundhog Day, the same day the famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. The storm came on the heels of a nor'easter last weekend that brought blizzard conditions to many parts of the East Coast.

___

Bleed reported from Little Rock, Arkansas. Associated Press writers Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; Paul J. Weber in Austin; Jake Bleiberg in Dallas; Paul Davenport in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland; Rick Callahan in Indianapolis and Jay Reeves in Alabaster, Alabama, contributed to this report.