Today is the last day of February, and while that also means we close the door on the month and head into March tomorrow, we also transition from meteorological winter to meteorological spring. We’ve already hit the low 80s in parts of the area for the first time this year just earlier this week, and it won’t be long until warmer weather is a consistent part of our daily forecast. Let’s take a look at some climatological stats for the month of March in our part of the Tennessee Valley to get an idea of what is “average” for our area. To do this, we will be using stats from the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals since it is the closest NWS climate reporting site that is centralized to our viewing area (there are none to choose from in southern middle Tennessee, out of our control).
March is often a wild month of change here in the Tennessee Valley as we are just beginning the transition from winter to spring. It often carries wind temperature fluctuations and sometimes big storm systems. Generally speaking, we start with mild temperatures by the end of the month and then generally trend up from there. The monthly average high temperature is 65 degrees, but we’re starting around 60 on March 1st and we’re ending the month averaging 69 to 70 degrees as a high. As you’d expect, our monthly lows are also in the moderating direction. We start with an average low of around 40 degrees to start the month, before getting up to around 47 as we end March, in terms of an average low temperature. The month overall has an average low of 43 to 44 degrees. We can certainly see extremes well away from these averages though, in both directions. The record monthly high for March at the Muscle Shoals NWS climate site is a whopping 92 degrees from 1929, and the record low is 7 degrees from 1899!
With an active storm track, March averages out to often be a fairly wet month in the region. The average monthly precipitation comes out to 5.14 inches. And yes, even though we are heading into spring, we can still sometimes get snow in March. Not only is the monthly record snowfall for the Muscle Shoals reporting site at 5 inches from 1968, but there have been plenty of other instances of significant accumulating snow in the general area in the month of March, including the infamous “Blizzard of 1993”.
One primary concern we have as we enter March is that we begin the spring part of our tornado season here in the Tennessee Valley. While our tornado season runs from November through May, and we can see intense tornadoes in the fall and winter months, it is the March through May stretch of it that is historically most active (especially the months of March and April). March and April are also statistically when you are most likely to see F4/EF4 or greater intensity tornadoes in our area, and there has never been a documented F5/EF5 tornado in Alabama or Tennessee outside of March and April, dating all the way back to the mid 1800s. This doesn’t mean that every March is active with tornadoes here every year, but this is the time of year that it is most important to pay attention to the weather and have your family’s safety plan in place ahead of time, before storms threaten.
