Some folks in North Georgia got an unusual late March sight: snow flurries fell briefly this afternoon.  Although it was 45 degrees outside, much colder air aloft combined with lower pressure caused by a short wave passing through squeezed out just enough moisture for the flakes, which melted on contact with the ground. Temperatures today are 20 degrees cooler than normal, and the northern two thirds of the state will see a freeze tonight.  If you succumbed to the spring planting urge over the weekend, either bring your plants in, or at least cover them over.

Tonight’s freeze won’t be anywhere near as bad as the Easter Freeze of 2007. though.  Not only is it likely to be a bit warmer than the 28 degrees recorded last April, but not as many plants have started to bloom. A freeze in late March isn’t too unusual.  For metro Atlanta, the typical last frost occurs sometime between April 1st and April 15th.

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You know that it’s been an unusual January when Atlanta records more snowfall than New York City. With no snow forecast for the last day of the month in either  city, Atlanta has recorded 1.4 inches of snow for the month, with most of that coming on the 19th. On the other hand, New York City recorded a trace of snow on the 27th, its only white stuff for the month.

According to an article in the New York Sun,  it’s the first time in 75 years that no measurable snow has fallen in NYC in January.  The article also quotes Weather Service officials as saying that the lack of snow in the Big Apple is due more to storm patterns tracking inland than due to global warming.

Hat tip to the Drudge Report for noticing this.

The first three weeks of January have brought a batch of unusual weather to metro Atlanta and North Georgia, seemingly to make fun of early-season forecasts, which called for a warmer than normal and drier than normal Winter.  But, if you look at things more closely, we may not be that far off from the original prediction.

The month started out with a cold blast, getting as low as 16.5 degrees on the third, the lowest temperature of the month. Four days later, the temperature topped 70 degrees on the 7th, the warmest day of a five day streak when highs were above 60, at least ten degrees above normal.  After a few days of more or less normal temperatures, we again saw a plunge over the weekend, when the thermometer refused to budge over 32 degrees on Sunday–that’s the second time this year that’s happened.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta area saw some light snow and sleet last Thursday, and got an inch or so on Saturday, depending on where you were.  Due to the cold weather, some of that snow is still on the ground, at least where I live.  And, the Weather Service as posted a Freezing Rain advisory for much of the state north of Atlanta, including Hall County, for tomorrow morning, as another storm prepares to roll in.  Three wintry precipitation events in a week seem like a lot.

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It looks like much of Gwinnett and Atlanta is getting needed rainfall this evening, as a relatively unexpected storm system moved in. Here in South Gwinnett, I’ve recorded .91 inches of rain. During the most intense parts of the storm, I saw quarter-sized hail, and for a period of about 20 minutes, hail ranging from the size of Kix cereal to the size of a jellybean fell.

This system is a bit unusual, in that it moved from northeast to southwest, the opposite of most systems. In a bit of a reverse of the fairly common cold air damming, a cold pool of air in the upper atmosphere came south, and ran into the warmer, moist air from the southwest that was already in place, causing the storms and hail. Typically, storms move from west to east, following the prevailing wind patterns.

The cold pool will be south of us tomorrow, reducing the chance of rain. However, it looks like we are in a fairly normal summer pattern, which is good news for the drought. If we get an inch or rain like this every week, even though there will be a deficit, the excessively dry conditions will be a thing of the past.

If you’ve gone outside at all today, you’ve probably smelled the smoke from the wildfires in south Georgia. The Big Turnaround and Bugaboo fires in the Okefenokee swamp continue to burn and, as we saw last week, the smoke can stretch 200 miles north to Atlanta.

The image below was taken about 9:45 this morning by NASA satellite, and it’s obvious that smoke is plaguing much of the state:

What’s actually happening is that winds in the south part of the state are blowing the smoke towards Augusta and South Carolina. Once the smoke got towards the mountains, they were redirected towards Atlanta, as can be seen by the plume on the left. The current Georgia satellite image shows that the winds have changed further south, so we should be seeing less smoke towards the evening, and tomorrow.