California has issued evacuation orders and warning calls for parts of the northern state due to the severe storm battering the coast.

Areas hit by forest fires in the past were among the first places to be evacuated due to fears of flooding and landslides.

California's governor declared a state of emergency over the storm - the second storm to hit the state in a week.

Meteorologists say the storm will turn into a "bomb cyclone," a type of explosive storm that has the potential to kill people.

 and strong winds for the entire Bay Area in northern California, noting that strong winds are expected to cause trees to fall and power outages.

And it warned of the "North Fork" dam's endangerment, noting that the water would exceed its discharge stream by Thursday morning. The weather service urged anyone in low-lying areas below the dam to "move to higher ground immediately".

More than a million Americans and Canadians will spend Christmas without electricity effects of the blizzard in the United States in pictures

Simply put, this is likely to be one of the most widely affected meteorological systems in a long time," the National Weather Service meteorologist said in a weather report.

"The effects will include widespread flooding, erosion of some roads, the collapse of hillsides, the downfall of trees (possibly entire groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce, and, worst of all, potential loss of life," he added.

He continued, "This is a really brutal regime that we expect and we must deal with it seriously."

The storm is expected to become a "bomb hurricane", a type of storm that intensifies rapidly and appears most commonly along the east coast of the United States and Canada.