Snow in Central Park in New York piled up to a near record level of 26.8 inches, just a fraction of an inch short of the top.

But snow wasn’t the only deadly natural phenomenon facing Americans: a nearly hurricane-force storm lashed the Delaware and Virginia coasts with 75-mile per hour winds.

And as snow drifts piled up across the eastern lands, flooding worse than that experienced during Superstorm Sandy hit the New Jersey coast.

But it wasn’t all bad news, Casey Neistat made a YouTube hit when he was towed through the New York City streets while snowboarding and videoing himself.

Another traffic jam in Kentucky stretched 35-miles and lasted about 19-hours.

Elsewhere in the national capital Washington DC, people were sledding down Capitol Hill.

Tian Tian the panda was also enjoying himself at Smithsonian Zoo.

Mainland China

In China, 24 weather stations around the country recorded all-time low temperatures between Friday and Sunday, the Associated Press reported.

As early as Thursday last week government officials had been warning people to take precautions as the arctic cold drifted south.

The warnings were correct, and as Chinese people embarked on the annual Spring Festival or Chinese New Year migration home their travel plans were thrown into disarray.

“The Spring Festival travel rush means a bigger workload, and this year, the cold weather has kept us busier,” Liu Ying, a train attendant on the Shanghai-Nanjing express rail service told Xinhua.

At Eergu’Na in Inner Mongolia, the temperature on Saturday hit a record low of -46.8 degrees Celsius.

The southern city of Guangzhou saw rare sleet, the first in 60 years, in its downtown area, the provincial meteorological station announced on Sunday.

Motorcyclist Wang Tianzhang got up at four o’clock in the morning on Sunday for a tiring two-day ride with his wife and fellow workers. They work in Foshan, south of Guangzhou and their hometown is an ethnic village in Guangxi’s Hechi City. A train ride takes about 20 hours and requires several transfers.

READ MORE: Hong Kong shivers through its coldest day since 1957 – kindergartens, primary schools closed today

For them, riding motorbikes is more convenient and cost-effective.

“The weather got worse as we headed toward Guangxi. It was freezing, and we had to stop every hour to find some warmth,” the middle-aged man told Xinhua.

London, UK

In the city known around the world for soul-crushing drizzle and snow that stops everything working, they appeared to be having a decent day. The city was cold, iced over and frosted but sunny.

New Delhi, India

India’s capital was shrouded in fog, which led to 79 cancelled train services and a 20-car pile-up on a highway about 80km outside the city, Xinhua reported. Visibility dropped to less than 50m on Sunday as temperatures plummetted.

Melbourne, Australia

Bushfires engulfed parts of the Otways National Park, near the popular Great Ocean Road coastal route to the west of Melbourne in late December. Since then the mercury has risen to a sweltering 43 degrees in mid-January. But it’s no surprise to any Melburnian that it was unseasonally raining and 23 degrees over the weekend.

Bangkok, Thailand

In perennially sweaty Bangkok temperatures dropped to 16 degrees on Sunday. The city rarely feels sub-20 degree weather, Agence France-Presse reported.

It left Bangkokians, whose normal attire generally includes flip-flops and shorts, digging for their jackets and jumpers.

Taipei, Taiwan

The polar vortex weather front has been blamed for the deaths of 57 mostly elderly people in Taiwan’s greater Taipei area.

The cold wave abruptly dragged temperatures to a 16-year record low of 4 degrees in the subtropical capital where most homes lack central heating, causing heart trouble and shortness of breath for many of the victims, a city official told AP.

Japan

In Japan five people died and more than 100 were injured on Sunday, with record-breaking heavy snowfall and low temperatures in the country’s western and central regions and rare snow in subtropical areas, officials and local media told AP.

The small subtropical island of Amami observed snow for the first time since 1901, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

And about 110 passengers on a bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station slept on it in western Japan, after the train arrived around 2 am Monday.

The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.

Heavy snow also kept roughly 100 vehicles stranded on Route 378 in the city of Yawatahama, Ehime Prefecture, from Sunday afternoon through evening, with 17 cars forced to stay overnight by the side of the road due to their lack of snow tires.

With a cold air mass gripping Japan, even usually-warm southern islands saw snow, with Okinawa observing snowfall Sunday for the first time in nearly 39 years and only the second time on record. Amami Island, a subtropical island in Kagoshima Prefecture, marked snowfall for the first time in 115 years.