There are signs that the weather in the United States may turn bad at some point. But it doesn’t look like it will happen fast enough to stop the bears from pushing natural gas futures lower.

The March Henry Hub gas contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 17.2 cents, or 6%, to $2.677 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). It had earlier hit a 21-month low of $2.646, a bottom not seen since April 2021.

Temperatures in New York City are forecast to be below 0 degrees Celsius this week.

Such temperatures typically signal that utilities, anxious to provide enough heat for the main gas heating market in the U.S., will draw on vast reserves of natural gas.

However, weakening Arctic winds could ease the cold, according to forecasts from the U.S. GFS Global Forecast System and European weather models ECMWF, which are being watched more closely by gas traders.

“The GFS and European ECMWF models are currently indicating a decrease in the number of accumulated gas-weighted degree days (GWDD) over the current two-week period,” said Gelber & Associates, a Houston-based consulting firm for energy traders.

“At this point, polar air accumulating over northern Canada will not cascade down into the lower 48 states as it did in late December. In the near term, only a small accumulation of cold temperatures will be seen in the Northeast and New England, rather than dominating most of the country,” Gelber said in the note.

The March Henry Hub gas contract showed relative stability toward the end of last week, when it changed just one cent at the close of trading Friday from Thursday’s level of $2.848.

That suggested the market may have bottomed out after a six-week slump that saw the one-month contract fall to $2,761 on Thursday.

But Monday’s resumption of the March decline showed that the short selling behind the 60% drop in natural gas prices since the week ended Dec. 9 is not yet over.

“At the current crossroads, bears in the natural gas market are still in control and may target the $2.60/mmbtu to $2.50/mmbtu range as a near-term downside target for March 2023 NYMEX natural gas futures due to milder near-term temperature forecasts,” Gelber analysts said.

Due to low consumption, U.S. gas inventories in storage at the end of the week ended Jan. 20 totaled 2.729 trillion cubic feet, up from 2.622 trillion cubic feet a year ago, according to weekly data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The collapse in gas prices came after an unusually warm start to the winter of 2022/23, which led to a drop in demand for the heating fuel. Prior to the collapse, the monthly Henry Hub price hit a 14-year high of $10 per million Btu in August and even reached $7 in December.