Experts say hotter temperatures are coming as soon as next week. One expert, Bill Murphey, tells us what we can expect as far as temperatures, both in the days ahead, as well as for the upcoming summer season.
“I think we can expect typical summer-like conditions,” says Murphey. “We are heading into summer now and we are going to see warm days, even hot days, coming up next week, especially relative to how it’s been this past month when we experienced below normal temperatures for the month of May.”
A strong, high-pressure system will be moving from east to west, bringing some extra hot days coming up in the next few days. In fact, the hot temperatures could break records next week. According to Murphey, it’s a little early in the season to be experiencing such high temperatures. In fact, Gainesville’s May record temperature is 91 degrees, and next week, there’s a good chance it could hit, or beat, that.
The downfall to the hotter weather according to Murphy is that the sudden warming of temperatures could bring drought conditions in the next couple of weeks, but he doesn’t expect that to be the trend over the course of the summer.
Murphey, who is the state climatologist of Georgia, as well as a meteorologist, says that overall he is expecting the summer season to bring average temperatures, and higher than normal tropical activity, which could actually help decrease drought conditions. “We are monitoring drought conditions because we are going to start drying out rather quickly across the state.” He adds that drought conditions are already happening in Central and South Georgia. “I am expecting drought conditions to pop up maybe even in the next few weeks. The hope is that we won’t get into really bad drought conditions but the potential for quick-drying, maybe even a flash drought situation, is still something to monitor over the next month or so until the tropics get going good.”
He is referring to tropical storms. Any activity in the tropics could bring more rainfall in our area, diminishing the risk for droughts. “We always take into account what happens in the tropics. Tropical activity could ramp up some rainfall amounts for this summer,“ adds Murphey.
On that note, he reports that higher than normal tropical activity is expected this summer. For the upcoming season, they are projecting between 13 and 20 named storms. The average is 14. Of those, 6-10 will become hurricanes, while the average is typically 7. Of those hurricanes, 3-5 are expected to become major. That is also above average. The average is 3 major hurricanes. However, Murphey predicts it still won’t be as busy of a hurricane season as last year. In 2020, an all-time record was set of 30 tropical cycles.
The Climate Prediction Center’s summer outlook is projecting a greater probability of above-average temperatures for the summer months. As far as precipitation goes, it is also projecting a slightly greater probability of above-normal precipitation, but Murphey says he is somewhere in the middle. “I’m sort of leaning on an equal chance of above, below or normal. If we get into the summertime pattern with afternoon thundershowers, it won’t be way above normal rainfall.” The only change to that would be whatever happens in the tropics.
According to Murphey, the good news is that up to this point there have been no drought conditions in Georgia. He says that’s had to do with all the rainfall we’ve had this year. We are close to normal rainfall levels for Gainesville, being just slightly above. “If you look at the last 90 days, we are still 110% normal precipitation for Gainesville. That’s one reason we have had no drought issues, stream flows are looking good, Lake Lanier is looking good,” he says.
Another interesting topic was the decrease in air pollutants last year while many cars were off the road due to the quarantine periods. “We’ve been monitoring pollutants – particle pollution and surface ozone and we have seen last year, especially when the shelter in place occurred, especially around March to June, we saw nice improvements in the air quality in the Atlanta area.” He says that overall, the Atlanta air has improved in recent years, but with covid, less mobile source emissions were on the road, helping and improving air quality overall. While there was a visible difference, he says we also had a lot of rainfall, clouds and wind which are not inducing to poor air quality. “However, we definitely could see some improvement in air quality with less traffic on the road,” he adds. “Now we have people back to work and on the road, so we anticipate the ozone will be a little higher than it was last year at this time.” Fires, including prescribed and agricultural burns, also contribute to air quality issues, as well.
There’s more information on Georgia’s climate, along with average monthly temperatures, on https://www.georgia.org/georgia-climate.
