A couple of Facebook posts this morning remind me that it is time to think about cold weather returning to our region. NWS Peachtree City has posted freeze warnings for Saturday night into Sunday morning for the northeast Georgia mountains. At least one of the CoCoRaHS observers has already reported temperatures down to 28 F this morning (although he seems to live in one of the coldest spots in Georgia!).
Frost has been slow coming to many parts of the nation this year. Weather Underground posted this blog about record late frosts in the Midwest at https://www.wunderground.com/news/latest-first-freeze-records-midwest?__prclt=nOL8Lcxr.
If you are looking for historical information on frost dates, a good place to start is the Southeast Regional Climate Center at https://www.sercc.com/climateinfo/historical/. Click to find your state and nearest station and then look down the left menu to find fall freeze probabilities. I’ve put the one for Athens GA below. Today is about 1/3 of the way through November, which puts us here in Athens at about a 65% probability for 32 degrees F. That means that in about 2 out of 3 years we have already had a 32 F minimum temperature by this date. You can also get a list of past dates using XMACIS at https://xmacis.rcc-acis.org/.
