Folks,
We may be about to make history. The calendar week 2/19-25/2017 is forecasted by the GFS to have only 93 US home heating customer weighted gas home heating degree days, which would be a whopping 94 DD's below normal for that week!!
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/cdus/degree_days/hfstwpws.txt
That is the normal for 4/11-17!! The 94 DD's below average would be the warmest anomaly for the US for ANY calendar week on that basis at least back to 1994! A word of caution, however. For some reason, there has in recent years been about a 10 or so bias too low with these forecasts. So, if that bias verifies, the actual DD's may "only" end up around 84 below normal for that week. Even that would be the normal for 4/5-11 and the warmest anomaly since the 87 below normal DD anomaly of 1/6-12/2007!
I plan to update this around this time next week to see what ends up verifying for this week. Exciting times even though this isn't what most of us want (I sure don't)!