Natural Gas Prices Blast Higher

As Weather Models Pick Up The Possibility Of An Incoming Polar Vortex.

Over the weekend, ECMWF-EPS turned meaningfully more bullish with the models forecasting an incoming polar vortex towards the 2nd half of February. Here's the latest ECMWF-EPS forecast:

Note to readers: We are publishing all of these weather models above for free on the HFIR chat. Please see the link below.

ECMWF-EPS TDD Table

ECMWF-EPS TDD Chart

6-10 Day Outlook

10-15 Day Outlook

15-Day Cluster

For those of you familiar with our natural gas updates, you will know that we pay a lot of attention to the 15-day cluster. This helps us determine just how much variability we are seeing in the current weather forecast.

As you can see in the 15-day, the models are very confident that the blocking pattern we are seeing from Alaska to Greenland holds. As a result, the incoming polar vortex is expected to be stronger in magnitude than the cold event we saw in January.

Yes, you are reading this correctly. If the current models trend the way they are trending, the intensity of the cold will be stronger, which is really incredible since January 2025 was already the coldest January since 1988.

For the natural gas market, an intense polar vortex has not been priced in despite the massive move we saw today. But for natural gas bulls, weather models ebb and flow and the current 10-15 day outlook will look different than what we are seeing today (could trend both ways).

To give you an idea of the fundamental implication of a mildly bullish polar vortex event, here are the current projections we see for natural gas storage: