Arctic air blasting across the northern tier of the United States gripped parts of the High Plains, the Upper Midwest and New England on Monday, with wind-chill alerts posted from Montana to Maine, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. The frigid air mass, ushered in behind a cold front sweeping over the East Coast into the Atlantic, was expected to bring a combination of icy temperatures and winds that make it feel as cold as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, the weather service said. Such dangerously low wind-chill factors can lead to frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes, the NWS warned. At the same time, cold, Arctic winds blowing in from the west across the Great Lakes are likely to bring heavy “lake-effect” snow to parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, upstate New York and western Pennsylvania over the next few days. More than a …