January – June, 2004 Weather Notes
Here are the weather notes originally posted on the About page of lawrencevilleweather.com for the first six months of 2004.
June 24 The storms continue to roll across the metro Atlanta area. Last night, wind gust managed to take the top off of one of my tulip trees in the front yard. Unfortunately, the broken limb landed on the power lines, breaking them and the telephone pole they connected to. This seems to have caused a fairly major outage here in the Brookwood cluster for about two hours. Kirk Melhuish has said he may need to change his summer forecast, calling for cooler and wetter weather for the summer than earlier predicted. It seems that there may be an El Niño pattern developing.
June 15 Seems like it’s been awful damp this month. For the most part, even on the days when it hasn’t rained, it’s still been very humid. As of today, the average humidity has been 83%, more than last year at this time.
May 3 April was a dry month, although very pleasant for sitting outside an enjoying “Chamber of Commerce” weather. May is only a few days old, and we’ve had more rain this month than in all of April.
March 22 March is supposed to go in like a lion and out like a lamb. After an extremely warm week last week, forecasters are predicting below freezing temperatures for tonight, which could cause problems for the plants that were inspired to bud out by the pleasant weather. We should remember, though, that the average last frost in Atlanta is not until April First, so we are still within limits for a freeze. Meanwhile, it remains extremely dry, with one of our wettest months only yielding .43 inches of rain to date. I have been watering the lawn and yard, you should probably think about doing the same thing.
March 14 For the first time in ten days, I updated the normal and year to date Atlanta rainfall totals. Over the period, we’ve only had slightly more than a quarter of an inch of rain. I don’t want to utter the D word, but we are down about four inches so far this year in the rainfall department. On the other hand, we’ve had better than normal Spring weather if you enjoy sitting outside and enjoying the sunshine.
March 3 As is typical of Atlanta spring weather, what last week was snow has turned into 15 degree warmer than usual temperatures this week. My thermometer today recorded 81 degrees. Warm weather is predicted through the end of the week. The risk now is a major cold spell that will kill the emerging flower buds that are in the process of coming out during this warm weather.
February 29 Atlanta had its first snow on Thursday, blanketing the ground with about an inch of the fluffy white stuff, and closing the schools in Gwinnett County for the day. As luck would have it, I was in Orlando, and missed it all, except for what I could see from the camera on this website. Meanwhile, the first daffodils are out, and we are rapidly gaining daylight — about two minutes per day. Was it the one and only snowfall of the season? I don’t know — the Atlanta NASCAR race comes up in two weeks, and I remember it being snowed out a few years ago.
January 16 The year has started out dry, as we are now about an inch and a half below normal for mid-January. We’ve also been warmer than usual. The average January temperature is 39 degrees — we’re at 44, helped out by very warm temps in the first few days of the year. Meanwhile, New England is suffering from record cold. Mount Washington, New Hampshire got down to a record 45 degrees below 0. Looks like another cold day for football on Sunday.
Today marks the first day that the sun rises earlier in the morning. Even though the longest night was back on December 21st, the gain in the length of the day has been driven by later sunsets, not earlier sunrises.
January 1 As the new year dawns, I have added some new historical data pages showing annual and monthly weather records for 2002 and 2003. Predictions for snowfall this winter season haven’t come true yet — in fact, the temperatures have been rather pleasant. We’ll see what 2004 brings, weather-wise.
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