Goofs

In the briefing scene with the President, Jack dramatically draws an evacuation line across the map of the United States. The line has been clearly redrawn. For the close up shots over Jack's shoulder.

When Jack jumps across the gap at the beginning all he his holding is the sample tubes, when he falls however he suddenly has an ice pick.

When the cleaner looks under the door, the very bright light shining from under the bottom of the door lights up the wall behind him casting a strong silhouette shadow of him on the wall, But it doesn't light him up as bright. Then the shadow raises it's arms before the cleaner does revealing it's not his real shadow.

When Jack and his team finely reach NYC, one of his team falls through a glass skylight roof covering a mall. When Jack look down to his fallen team member he is lying over the hole looking down and in one scene the glass is supporting Jack with a iron support beam. In the next shot the beam is missing.

When Frank is hanging from the roof of the supermarket, you can see that Jason's hand is bleeding. In subsequent shots, there is no blood and no bandage.

It's stated that the temperature that froze the gas lines was -150 degrees F but when the pilot opens the door you can see his breath. At 90 degrees F below zero your breath will freeze and fall to the ground.

When Jack and Dash reach the library where Sam is taking refuge they initially can't find it. When they do discover Sam inside the fireplace is clearly lit. That means that smoke should have been visible from the outside. If the chimney was covered by snow, then smoke would have filled the room where the survivors are, yet there is none.

The penicillin aboard ship was found in solution. If in solution it should have been found frozen and it is clearly liquid when picked up. Normally penicillin is stored as a powder and reconstituted (by adding water or sterile sodium chloride solution) just prior to use. Penicillin in solution is not clear, it is a milky white color.

Several times during the film, including the British helicopter crash, and the penicillin retrieval from the cargo ship, characters are seen touching frozen metal with bare hands, yet the hands do not stick.

Hailstones are shown as plain clear chunks of ice. Because of the way that they form, hailstones are opaque balls of concentric layers of accumulated ice (like rings of a tree), or agglomerated lumps of smaller stones.

After the reporter is hit by the flying billboard from the tornado, the billboard flips over and there isn't a body. In the special features on the DVD, an animatic is shown, showing the reporter was left on the road, as opposed to him being stuck on the billboard.

When a big storm threatens land, Hurricane Centers do not send helicopters out into storms so they can investigate them. During a storm, helicopters only rescue people and help bring in storm supplies to the affected areas. In the movie, three British helicopters are flying towards a massive storm over Europe to research and investigate it. Helicopters never fly into storms that big and strong because that weren't designed for that type of weather. They should have instead used Hurricane Hunter airplanes to investigate the storm.

But the dialogue clearly states that the three helicopters are not there to research and investigate the storm. They are flying to Balmoral, the British Royal Family's Scottish residence, on a mission to rescue Her Majesty the Queen.

Jack Hall says he's walked from NOAA to NYC in the snow before. NOAA is in Silver Spring, MD. The NYC Public Library is on 5th Street in Manhattan. That's a 220 mile walk. In the best of conditions, it would take close to a week to walk there (factoring in rest stops, 8 hours of sleep per night, and the fact that in the movie, you'd be walking across the frozen Hudson River instead of taking the ferry). ~ CORRECTION: They were able to drive most of that distance before the roads became impassable. They only had to walk from "just north of Philadelphia", roughly 75 miles, not 220. Still quite a challenge in a blizzard, but they were used to doing research in similar conditions (like Antarctica).

The wolves break free and run away themselves, before Manhattan floods with very high water and freezes over. After it happens the wolves appear alive and running amok. It's possible that they went into a building (there are a vast number of buildings in NYC), to high floor and stayed there until after the streets of Manhattan flooded and froze over.

Judith, the librarian, finds a room in the library and says that the fireplace probably hasn't been used in about a hundred years. If a fireplace hasn't been inspected in a hundred years that would be a major critical violation. A non-inspected chimney could have dirt, trash, or dead animals in it which would have caused the chimney to catch on fire. However when Sam opens the chimney flue, FRESH SNOW falls out, indicating that the chimney is clear of blockages, and if it's letting snow IN, then it can let smoke OUT, and there's no chance of a fire outside the fireplace.

All over the movie, there is no condensation coming out of people's mouths when they are in a cold environment.

Onboard the ship, the pharmacy is locked from the inside, with a type of key in the door which means it could not have been locked from the outside.

When the students are flying through the thunderstorm you can hear typical rolling thunder. However, rolling thunder is an echo caused by surrounding storm cells. It would not be audible at the height of a plane flying.

When Jack and his team finally reach NYC, one of his team falls through a glass skylight roof covering a mall, Jack swings his metal pick ax into the snow to stop everyone from sliding though the hole and hold the weight of the three men, one of whom is dangling in mid air. A moment later Jack, still in the same spot, wipes of a few inches of powdered snow to reveal they are all on top of the glass roof of a mall. Thus when Jack uses the pick it should have gone through the snow and broken the glass roof he was laying on.

When Lucy Hall checks up on Peter, he's hooked up to some life-support machines. When the hospital is being evacuated to the south, Lucy agrees that she will stay behind with him till the ambulance arrives. The power is left on. As the ambulance finally arrives all the power is turned off. Since the heater is off, they both would have died from hypothermia. Peter would have also died without power to the machines that keep him alive. There should have been a back-up generator to keep both the machines and the heater on.

When the homeless man is ripping pages out of books to put them under his clothes to keep warm, he explains "Newspaper's best, but this'll do". There are many newspapers in the New York Public Library, as there usually are in any bigger library.

In the shot establishing the upset animals in the zoo, the bear cage shot is clearly flipped as seen by the word "BEAR" being backwards on screen.

When the group is shown in Philadelphia and a member falls through a skylight, the person is shown being suspend roughly 40-60 feet above the floor below. That means that the snow would be covering the entire mall and thus have drifted to a height of 65-70 feet at minimum. Given that only hours and not days had passed, this would be impossible as that much snow falling in such a short period would have collapsed the roof well before the group arrived,

At 1:45:43 one of the astronauts on the ISS is asked if it's true that the storm is dissipating over North America. He confirms this by looking at Europe and saying "Affirmative. It's finally clearing. We are over Europe right now."

Professor Rapson could not have known that the fuel lines in the helicopters froze. The people on the helicopters didn't know the fuel lines froze and nobody could have survived to investigate that they froze.

The people on the helicopters knew that the fuel lines were freezing, one of them actually says "The bloody fuel lines are freezing".

After the Global Warming Conference when Prof. Rapson is hailing the cab, he removes his fingers from his mouth before the whistle is finished. That type of whistle requires fingers to remain in the mouth.

When the cleaner is walking towards the brightly lit door, you can see the shadow of the boom operator behind him.

The Cameraman's reflection can be seen in the right-hand side of the Porsche during the tornado sequence

The view shown from the ISS of the earth covers a far larger area than what can actually be seen from it as the ISS is in a very low orbit.

There is no way a cargo ship could fit down 5th Avenue by the Library. The buildings there don't have enough space between them to allow it through.

When the tsunami hits Manhattan, there is no sign of Brooklyn in the representation of New York harbor. In reality, the tsunami would be unlikely to reach Manhattan without striking Long Island first. Also, the shot of water flooding the avenues means the water turned 90 degrees after it first hit Manhattan.

It doesn't make sense for the group leaving the library to make their way to Staten Island via Brooklyn. (They could have just crossed the frozen harbor, for example).

During the "sky TV" report about snow in the British Isles, the cars are on the right hand side of the road, and a yellow American style crossing signal is seen.

The Russian cargo ship that drifts into the street outside the library, appears to be completely undamaged and seaworthy. So why are there no crew on board? There is no obvious reason for them to have abandoned ship.

When the group is taking refuge in the library, they choose to burn books to keep warm. Not only are books rather hard to burn without an accelerant, the group has a huge supply of wooden furniture and doors that would make much better fuel.

In the final scenes, when helicopters rescue survivors in NY, people congregate on the roofs of skyscrapers. How did they manage to get onto the roof from inside the building when the roof is covered in more than 10 feet of snow and ice?

When one of the people who left the library considers turning back, the other guy says "Half the city is frozen and underwater. There's nothing to go back to." Half a city is not nothing. Half a city is half a city. There are still plenty of buildings in New York City to take shelter in.

When storms that move in a circular motion increase in size their wind speeds tend to increase as well. Throughout the whole movie, the wind speeds don't quite match up with the continent-sized storms. They don't move as fast or as hard. They only blow just a little bit. Storms of that size and magnitude would have produced extremely dangerous winds speeds and gusts well over 175 MPH. The snow and ice wouldn't have been as deep and thick. Everything on land including the skyscrapers in New York would have been completely destroyed.

American glaciologists in Antarctica are heard using US units of measurement during their work. The metric system is in use by glaciologists - even American ones - in all scientific contexts.

During a meeting with his cabinet, the President stands and leaves, yet everyone seated at the table remains seated. White House protocol requires that when the President stands up, so does everyone else.

Quaid's character is looking at a satellite photo of a large storm over Scotland and mentions it looks like a hurricane. The female scientist then adds: "Except hurricanes don't form over land." Scotland is a narrow point of land on an island. With a storm of that size, the United Kingdom's islands would not nearly be enough land mass to stop it from forming.

In a scene where a reporter is speaking of people going to Mexico to escape the storm, she says that people are fleeing "in the wake of the advancing storm". But "in the wake of" means following something, not preceding it.

In the shot where Jack Hall is explaining why the air coming out of the cyclone is so cold, the computer model of the low pressure system is spinning clockwise, not counter clockwise, as it should be in the northern hemisphere. Also in the starlit picture when the weatherman says that the low pressure systems resembles a "tropical hurricane" is also spinning clockwise.