Cooling

The current La Nina event — the cooling of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures off the coast of South America — remains unchanged and is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere’s winter season, influencing weather patterns across the United States for the next several months, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The current La Nina event — the cooling of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures off the coast of South America — remains unchanged and is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere’s winter season, influencing weather patterns across the United States for the next several months, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For the second year in a row, a La Nina event — cooling of ocean surface temperatures off the western coast of South America — will influence winter weather patterns across the United States, while the less predictable Arctic Oscillation could produce “dramatic” swings in winter temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For the second year in a row, a La Nina event — cooling of ocean surface temperatures off the western coast of South America — will influence winter weather patterns across the United States, while the less predictable Arctic Oscillation could produce “dramatic” swings in winter temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Price gains were virtually across the board Wednesday and were larger than the prior day’s mostly minuscule upticks. Cooling load is recovering in many areas from its slump during the first two-thirds of August, and Tuesday’s 10.4-cent increase by September futures was an additional bullish factor.

Finding only relatively moderate cooling load for mid-August in many areas and weighed down slightly by the previous Friday’s near-nickel futures drop, nearly all of the cash market followed up Friday’s gains with softening Monday.

Prices continued to fall at a large majority of points Friday despite a few slight reversals of cooling trends. The overall diminution of air conditioning load from earlier in the week was still largely in place, and it was abetted by the previous day’s 8.4-cent decline by August futures following a bearish storage report and the usual drop of industrial load during a weekend in pushing cash numbers lower.

Prices declined, mostly by double digits, across the board Thursday as a relative lack of substantive cooling demand combined with the previous day’s 7.1-cent dip in July futures to bring bearish pressure on the cash market.

Gains were still small, but a few points that had been flat a day earlier were beginning to record upticks of a couple of pennies or so Thursday. Cooling load was bolstered by continuing high temperatures throughout the South being joined by forecasts of huge peak temperature jumps in parts of the Midwest that were still relatively low as recently as Thursday.