New York City is poised to endure its longest deep freeze in 65 years if the frigid forecasts hold through next weekend, according to experts.
The Big Apple is expected to have shivered at 32 degrees or below for 15 days straight by the time the cold is likely to break next Saturday, Feb. 7 – the longest extreme cold snap the Big Apple has seen in well over half a century, AccuWeather meteorologists told The Post on Sunday.
New York City is in the middle of a massive cold snap that will not relent for another week. Getty Images“We are expecting the high temperature to be at or below 32 through next Saturday, which would rank as the second longest streak with the maximum temperature at or below 32 in years,” meteorologist Chad Merrill said.
The last time the city endured such a 15-day streak was in 1881, Merrill said Sunday — the same day a bomb cyclone helped fuel wicked wind chills amid single-digit temps in the Big Apple.
The current streak is expected to fall just short of breaking the all-time record of 16 days at freezing or below set in 1961.
The last time the city experienced such consistent frigid temperatures was 1961.
“There likely be a pattern change late next weekend into early the following week that would push the temperature above freezing for a couple of days,” Merrill said.
“I think we’re looking at that streak probably ending Sunday or Monday,” he said.
City temps this year haven’t broken above 32 since Jan. 24, and next week is expected to be no different.
The frigid cold is being driven by high pressure systems lingering over the Greenland area and the western US, causing cold arctic air to come sliding down across the east coast and central US.
“We’re getting a kind of a direct connection or direct line, and from the northern regions where the air mass is originating, and it’s taking the shortest distance it can from all the way up close to the Arctic Circle down into the eastern US,” Merrill said.
That’s helped fuel a massive blizzard that buried swaths of the mid-Atlantic and East Coast in snow with Jan. 25’s Winter Storm Fern and was exacerbated a week later by a bomb cyclone that stormed up the coast and whipped chilling winds across the city Sunday.
Wind chills were expected to drop below 0 degrees Sunday night.
Forecasts call for another week of days in the mid-20s and nights in the teens and single digits.
The cold has been brutal in the city, with at least 14 people suspected of being killed outdoors so far.
