After solidly predicting the Arctic cold front that has frozen New England (see NGI, Jan. 12), Joe Bastardi, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com, said last week that the region is not out of the woods yet.

“In the worst-case scenario, we could be looking at a two-week period similar to the winters in ’77 and ’78,” Bastardi said. “New England is in the throes of one of the five worst Januarys.” Referring to the cold winters experienced during the late 1970s, Bastardi said, “We could be looking at a situation that could produce that kind of cold, or that kind of snow.”

Bastardi added that over the next two weeks, a large portion of the East will be cold.

Talking about two weeks ago, Bastardi said warm forecasts from the National Weather Service for last week ended up “crunching” the whole gas market. “It was Monday [Jan. 13], they came out with all of the warm weather in the East, they held on into Tuesday the 14th, and everything was warm, warm, warm in the East for this week,” he said. “The whole gas market marched like lemmings into the ocean with it. I was amazed by it…the whole darn market goes, ‘That’s it, winter is over in the East!'”

In an interview Tuesday, Bastardi said that while the worst-case scenario puts the next 15 days into the cold class of the 1977-78 winters, he believes the “next 15 days will not be as extreme as the past 15 days, because you can’t get any worse than the past 15 days.

“We may have a few days when it gets to normal or above, but if you look at the next 15 days in New York City, 12 should be below, and about six to seven will be much below,” he said. “The big news will be the Plains. The southern Plains will go back and forth over the next seven days, then the coldest air mass of the winter should charge south down through there after that.”

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