(CNN) -- Delta Air Lines has pre-emptively canceled approximately 500 Christmas Day flights, a company spokesman said Friday, as it and other U.S. airlines work to get ahead of a storm that's threatening the East Coast.
Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesman, said Friday that the airline has canceled roughly 300 flights in and out of Atlanta and 200 more elsewhere around the country.
Delta also has joined Continental, United, American and AirTran in waiving penalties for travelers who have to reschedule their trips over the weekend.
The mid-Atlantic and Northeast could see combinations of rain, sleet and snow, with the heaviest amounts of precipitation in highest elevations, CNN meteorologists said. Still, forecasters on Friday noted considerable uncertainty as to the shape, the direction and the strength of the system.
By Friday evening, National Weather Service forecasters were predicting that an intensifying low-pressure system should hit Saturday night off the Carolinas coast and barrel northward toward Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
In parts of West Virginia, light snow starting Friday night was expected to give way to a "prolonged snow shower event" on Saturday night into Monday, the weather service said. Two to five inches could fall every 12-hour period in mountainous areas.
A hazardous weather outlook was issued from Massachusetts south down the East Coast through New York, New Jersey, Delaware and into Maryland.
The New York metropolitan area has a 40 percent chance of precipitation, which was expected to start after noon and fall as snow. While the accumulation there was expected to be fairly minimal, the weather service noted that a shift in the storm's track could mean "significant wind-driven snowfall to the entire region".
In addition, winds could gust as strong as 50 mph for eastern Connecticut and New York's Long Island. CNN
