Azaleas and forsythia blooming in Central Park? This is clearly no ordinary January.

The city parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, spotted these flowers along with daffodils yesterday.

Elsewhere in the park there is ice, but it is artificial. “The weather has affected us in a positive way,” said the general manager of Wollman Rink, Dale Klied. He said there are a few thousand people skating daily. He said the popular outdoor rink has refrigeration pipes beneath the concrete to keep the ice frozen.

A founder of Hunter Mountain ski resort, Orville Slutzky, said the resort had fewer than 1,000 people skiing yesterday on the 24 trails that were open of its 53 total trails. He said there have been other years notable for lack of natural snow: On January 1, 1965, he said, the resort opened the chairlift for sightseeing.

The executive director of the National Weather Association, Stephen Harned, said warm weather up and down the East Coast was a result of the circulation of the jet stream. He said the jet stream was keeping cold air trapped in Canada and when that air started moving south, it was heading to the western part of America, allowing warm air to arrive from the Gulf and Mexico.

“It’s unprecedented,” said a professor of geography at Rutgers University, David Robinson, who noted that this has been the warmest November and December on record in New Jersey since 1895. He said there are likely to be fewer potholes and that heating bills would be lower.

A spokesman for Con Edison, Chris Olert, said that its 1.1 million gas customers, of whom 30% use natural gas for heating, had lower bills in December 2006 than in December 2005. He said the outlook for the balance of the season was that bills were expected to be about the same as or a little lower than last year, which had a mild winter.

Another lower bill so far this year in New York is the for snow removal. A spokesman for the city Department of Sanitation, Vito Turso, said by this time last year the city already had nine and onefourth inches of snow from four separate storms. He said Mayor Bloomberg has estimated the overall cost of snow removal at about $1 million an inch of snow. “We’ve been fortunate so far, but we’ve got several more months of winter to go,” said Mr. Turso, who noted that normally, the snowiest period of winter is in the early part of February. He cautioned that nine-inch snowfalls have occurred in April.

Mr. Benepe said horse and carriage riders as well as pedicabs were doing well in the warm weather. He also wryly noted that what was blooming in Central Park was tourism.

The high temperature in New York City on Saturday is forecast by Accuweather to be 60 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the average temperature for January. Parts of America other than the Northeast have experienced heavy snowfall this winter.