Mild winter temperatures, which have played a part in holding down natural gas prices, dominated much of the country last month, making it the fourth-warmest January on record for the contiguous United States, according to AccuWeather.com.

The average temperature for January was 36.3 degrees in the Lower 48, which is 5.5 degrees above normal and made it the warmest January since 2006.

“It’s warmer this year mainly because of the jet stream pattern,” said AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist Michael Pigott. “Generally, for the most part of the winter, it has been on a west-to-east pattern. Meteorologists refer to this as a ‘zonal flow.’ Essentially, we’ve seen a lot of storms moving from west to east and not a lot traveling northward or southward. So anything in the Arctic is staying up there, and anything in the U.S. is staying put as well.”

Nine states — Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, Arizona and Kansas — recorded their top 10 warmest average temperatures for January in 2012. And the six-month period going back to August 2011 was the fifth warmest ever recorded in the Lower 48, with 40 states recording warmer-than-average temperatures, AccuWeather.com said.

The relatively warm weather may continue into March, according to AccuWeather.com’s Jack Boston, expert senior meteorologist.

“It looks like the pattern will be similar for most of the country but not to the same extent,” Boston said. “We are getting in a pattern where we’re more susceptible to cold air masses coming down. However, that doesn’t mean they’re going to stay. They’re still going to be progressive. That means cooler temperatures will come in for only a few days, then disappear again…The average will be somewhat above normal, though it won’t be as above normal as January.”

While much of the country will continue to see warmer-than-normal weather, relatively colder temperatures may move into the Northeast “just in time for spring,” Boston said. “Unfortunately, I can see a pattern developing where we will have cooler-than-normal weather in the Northeast starting later in March and continuing through April. We expect blocking to develop in the atmosphere.”

Weather Services International, on the other hand, has said it expects colder-than-normal temperatures to dominate the nation’s northern tier beginning this month (see NGI, Jan. 30a). WSI’s most recent three-month forecast called for a 2.4% reduction in heating demand compared with last winter, but a 5.2% increase relative to 1981-2010 averages.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey McClendon last month said “an exceptionally mild winter,” which has pressured U.S. gas prices “to levels below our prior expectations and below levels that are economically attractive for developing dry gas plays in the U.S.,” is part of the reason his company plans to curtail 0.5 Bcf/d, or 8%, of its current operated gross gas output, which is 6.3 Bcf/d — 9% of the nation’s estimated gas production (see NGI, Jan. 30b).

Mild winter weather has held the lid on natural gas prices, but growing natural gas production — much of it coming from the nation’s shale plays — is doing even more to clamp down on the market. U.S. natural gas supply growth is much more resilient than the market now believes, and producers “likely” will have to shut in more than 1 Tcf of natural gas sometime this year, energy analysts at Raymond James & Associates Inc. said last week (see related story).

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