CHICAGO—A powerful winter storm was barreling through the eastern half of the United States on Thursday, bringing a variety of weather threats to the area that included heavy snow, damaging thunderstorms, and the potential of isolated tornadoes. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued winter storm, strong wind, and thunderstorm warnings and watches for the wide swath of the nation stretching 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from western Oklahoma to northern Maine from Thursday afternoon into Friday. The system was expected to dump a quick burst of snow on an area from Oklahoma to Michigan and into the Northeast while threatening Mississippi and Tennessee up through Ohio and into the Northeast with severe thunderstorms, the NWS said. “It’s a pretty potent large-scale storm system that’s got a lot of different hazards associated with it depending on where folks,” are said NWS meteorologist in Matt Beitscher, who is based in St. Louis. “In …