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A highway pileup near Kingston, Ontario, involving about 30 vehicles, including a number of tractor-trailers, left one person dead and several injured, according to officials. Curtis Dick, a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police, said the crash was related to the storm, and that the area had seen a “significant amount of snowfall” accumulate over a short period of time.

The authorities in Arizona found the bodies of two young children who had been among nine people riding in a vehicle on Friday that was swept away as it tried to cross a creek swollen with runoff from the storm. A third child was still missing.

Investigators are looking into whether blizzard conditions in South Dakota caused the crash of a private plane shortly after it took off bound for Idaho on Saturday. The 12 people on board belonged to the same family; nine were killed.

Can it be a winter storm if autumn isn’t over yet?

The calendar says the first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere is still nearly three weeks away. But the storm that has been slashing across the country is correctly called a winter storm, because “winter” means something a bit different to a meteorologist than it does to astronomers and calendar-makers, who mark the start of the season with the winter solstice.

That’s the moment when the northern half of the earth is tipped most directly away from the sun. This year, the solstice will occur at 11:19 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 21, which will be the shortest day and longest night of the year.

But meteorologists define the seasons using the annual cycle of average temperatures, with the three coldest months of the civil calendar considered “meteorological winter.” That season began on Sunday, Dec. 1.

So the weather isn’t just wintry — to a weather forecaster, it’s a winter storm.