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So much for spring, NYC. Winter is 'giving us one last punch in the face.'
By
Ryan Kost
Published Apr 30, 2026
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By
Ryan Kost
Published Apr 30, 2026
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Spring can’t seem to make up its mind. After a taste of summer earlier this month, New Yorkers are heading into yet another weekend in jackets — and forecasters say the chill isn't going anywhere soon.
Highs in the city will slide into the upper 50s and low 60s on Saturday and Sunday, roughly 7 to 10 degrees below normal for this time of year, said Brian Ciemnecki, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service.
There’s also some chance of rain Saturday night into Sunday morning, he said. A low-pressure system is tracking south of Long Island, though forecasters are still watching how close the system gets to the coast.
A brief reprieve arrives early next week with temperatures in the upper 60s on Monday and then the low-to-mid 70s on Tuesday and Wednesday, Ciemnecki said.
But then it’s back to unseasonably cool weather through at least the middle of the month, said John Homenuk of New York Metro Weather.
The culprit? A high-latitude block that’s disrupting the jet stream.
“It basically starts an atmospheric traffic jam,” said Homenuk, who wrote about the annoyingly stubborn chill on his site.
Normally the jet stream carries weather systems west to east across the country at a steady clip, Homenuk said. But when a block sets up to the north, everything slows down.
“There's sort of a stop sign up to our north, and all that cold air that typically resides up there oftentimes gets shunted down towards us,” he said.
That same sort of pattern drove a lot of the region’s cold, snowy weather, according to Homenuk.
The spring version is milder, but it’s also why April felt so disorienting. The high in Central Park hit 86 degrees on both April 15 and 16, according to meteorologists. Less than two weeks later, on April 25, it was 51.
All of this can be traced back to a burst of stratospheric warming — high above the troposphere, where our weather happens — that disrupted the polar vortex back in February and March, Homenuk said.
There’s always some sort of final warming event, he added, but we don’t always feel it.
“Sometimes it can be really mellow and we don't really notice anything,” he said. “And sometimes it could be really dramatic like this."
The effects take weeks to filter down, and that’s roughly where we are now.
As Homenuk put it, winter is “giving us one last punch in the face.”
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new york city
new york state
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Ryan Kost
Ryan Kost is a reporter on the day-of news desk, where he covers breaking news and writes enterprise stories about jails, courts, prosecutors and government accountability. His work focuses on the public institutions that shape life in New York. Before joining the newsroom, he lead a multi-part investigation with Columbia Journalism Investigations and New York Focus into how New York prosecutors handle wrongful conviction claims. He's also been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, The Associated Press and The Oregonian. Got a tip? Signal: ryankost.20
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