A typhoon might give fall the shove it needs to chill the U.S.
The mammoth typhoon that drenched Japan could help a swath of the U.S. finally cool down more than a month after autumn began in the Northern Hemisphere.
Energy from the remnants of Typhoon Lan, which claimed at least three lives and caused landslides and flooding, is expected to roil wind patterns over the Pacific Ocean, allowing cold air to descend deep into the central U.S. and brush the East Coast. The U.S. Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Md., said Tuesday that temperatures could fall below normal between Oct. 30 and Nov. 3 from the middle of the country across to much of the east.
That would give natural-gas prices a boost. Just the prospect of a nip in the air was enough to push them up 7.6 cents Monday to $2.991 per million British thermal units in New York. That was the biggest percentage gain since Oct. 12. But prices fell back Tuesday to settle at $2.974. Traders are “taking a wait-andsee attitude,” said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group Inc.
Lan’s remnants won’t bring relief to the west, thanks to a high-pressure system stretching from California to Colorado that’s acting like a dome, baking the region. The temperature in downtown Los Angeles hit 102 degrees Monday, and the city has been about 4.8 degrees warmer than normal all month.
New England might miss out on the cold too, because another high over the Atlantic Ocean could keep that slice of the country under its own temperate bubble.
With typhoons still growing in the western Pacific, though, there might be another chance for chill in a few weeks. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center is already tracking the next storm, a tropical cyclone called Saola, which may graze Japan on Oct. 29.
This autumn, which began Sept. 22, has been balmy. From Oct. 1 through Oct. 23, temperatures were 8.8 degrees warmer than normal in Chicago, 7.8 degrees higher in New York’s Central Park and 7.2 degrees more across Boston, the National Weather Service said.
That’s apparent in many trees from New York to Boston that are still solid green rather than aflame with reds and oranges, or whose leaves are turning straight to brown and shriveling on their branches.
“Warmer temperatures, particularly the warm nights, can certainly delay and even mute leaf change,” said Richard Harper, a professor in the Environmental Conservation department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
October 2016 was third-warmest in the U.S. in 122 years. Steven Silver, a meteorologist at MDA Weather Systems in Gaithersburg, Md., said the first three weeks of this October, based on the number of what are called heating-degree days in large population centers, were the warmest going back to 1950. The only October to beat it, according to that measure, was in 1963.