Earth last year shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world's agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency said Tuesday.

In one of the first of several teams of science agencies to calculate how off-the-charts warm 2023 was, the European climate agency Copernicus said the year was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. That's barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris climate accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming.

A sprawling storm that pelted much of the nation's midsection with more than a half a foot of snow and gusty winds created whiteout conditions that closed parts of two interstate highways and prompted officials to close schools and government offices in several states Tuesday.

Up to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters) of snow could blanket a broad area stretching from southeastern Colorado all the way to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, including western Kansas, eastern Nebraska, large parts of Iowa, northern Missouri and northwestern Illinois, said Bob Oravec, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.

A major winter storm bringing heavy snow and freezing rain to some communities spread across New England on Sunday, sending residents scurrying for their shovels and snowblowers to clear sidewalks and driveways.

Winter storm warnings and watches were in effect throughout the Northeast, and icy roads made for hazardous travel as far south as North Carolina.

Slovenia's rescuers are hoping on Monday to extract five people who have been trapped in a cave for more than two days because of high water levels.

The rescue operation should be completed by mid-afternoon if everything goes as planned, said Sandi Curk, who is coordinating the effort.

Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate their homes on Monday after flooding inundated parts of Victoria state, as wild weather continues to batter Australia's southeast.

The issue was ordered for badly hit areas in the small towns of Seymour and Yea, about 70 miles north of Melbourne. Authorities told residents and tourists to leave immediately as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels.

Carbon dioxide emissions in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, dropped to their lowest level in seven decades as the use of coal declined unexpectedly sharply in 2023 and economic pressures weighed down production by energy-intensive industry, according to a study released Thursday.

Germany aims to cut its emissions to net zero by 2045 and is working to ramp up the use of solar and wind power and other renewable sources.

On a warm summer afternoon, Tina Taniguchi was on her hands and knees scraping dirt off an oblong depression in the ground. Thick brown hair peeked out from her coconut leaf hat. Splotches of mud stuck to her T-shirt and speckled her smiling face.

Taniguchi smiles a lot when she's working in her corner of the Hanapepe salt patch on the west side of Kauai — a terracotta plot of land about the size of a football field — dappled with elliptical pools of brine, crystallizing in clay beds.

Temperatures fell below minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Nordic region for a second day in a row Wednesday, with the coldest January temperature recorded in Sweden in 25 years.

In Kvikkjokk-Årrenjarka in Swedish Lapland, the mercury dropped to minus 43.6 C (minus 46.5 F), the coldest temperature in the country in January since 1999, Sweden's TT news agency reported.

China's average temperature in 2023 was its hottest since records began, state media said citing officials Tuesday, capping a year of extreme weather events for the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Parts of northern and central Europe continued to grapple with flooding on Thursday after heavy rain. A barrier near the German city of Magdeburg was opened for the first time in a decade to ease pressure from the Elbe River, and some animals were removed from their enclosures at a safari park in northern Germany.

This week's floods have prompted evacuations of dozens or hundreds of people in parts of northern and central Germany, but largely dry weather was forecast on Thursday. Still, water levels on some rivers caused concern, and they have continued to rise in parts of Lower Saxony state in the northwest.