Storm to cloak Midwest to Northeast in snow, freezing rain

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - A wide band of ice, freezing rain and snow was expected to march across the Midwest Friday, stretching across a broad swath of the country into the Northeast, where many areas were still recovering from a winter storm last week. The National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory for Friday and Saturday, citing a "complex storm system" spanning a thousand miles or more from Missouri to the northern tip of upstate New York. Several major cities were likely to be impacted, including New York City, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, weather services said. The storm is expected to dump as much as 7 inches of snow from parts of the Midwest into the Ohio Valley, and from northern Pennsylvania to western New York. It will also produce sleet, rain, fog and possibly thunderstorms, the weather service said. "We might have rain and thunder on the south side and snow and ice to the north," said NWS meteorologist Jon Carney. Roadways and sidewalks were likely to become slick, with visibility poor for motorists as well as air traffic, weather services warned. Several accidents were already reported by Friday in Kansas City and other cities in the U.S. Northeast as cars skidded on icy roadways. (Reporting by Kevin Murphy and Carey Gillam; Editing by Bernadette Baum)