I’ve been getting a few emails asking about the current warm weather and if it is likely to continue since growers are concerned about bud break if the warm weather continues. I put a thermograph of daily temperatures for Blairsville below to show how temperatures have changed over time. On the thermograph, the green band is the daily average high and low temperature, with red the extremes for each date and blues the extreme lows for the period of record for Blairsville. The gray bars are the actual observations this season. Keep in mind that the Blairsville station is in a valley so it is often the coldest part of Georgia due to cold air drainage, so your vineyards may not have experienced the same temperatures. You can see that the recent warming gave us temperatures much above normal for this time of year but that they have recently returned to more normal temperatures.
The good news for producers is that the weather pattern is expected to shift in the next week and cooler temperatures are expected to return to the state for most of the rest of February. I looked at the long-range temperature forecasts and saw several outbreaks of cooler weather, including some frosts in northern parts of the state. The current models are showing the coldest weather around February 14-15 and 19-22. This could change in future forecasts. None of these cold outbreaks looks exceptionally cold, just back to the upper 20s or even warmer depending on where you are. That will help keep the vines dormant until we get past the frost season. A map of the predicted morning temperatures for February 14, 2024, is shown below.
If I see bigger changes coming, I will be sure to post a note in this blog.
