It’s almost hard to believe the year has flown by as it has, but here we are making our way out of September and we begin October tomorrow! We are now firmly within the early portion of fall, and our weather here in the Tennessee Valley typically responds accordingly. Our average temperatures change pretty quickly as we head through the month. As we start October, our average daytime high is still just shy of 80 degrees, but as we end the month and head into November, we average ourselves in the upper 60s! That certainly doesn’t mean we can’t be hot in October though. The monthly record high temperature from our local area’s climate reporting station at the Muscle Shoals airport is 100 degrees set in 2019, and there were also 100 degree temperatures in October 2018 associated with the subsidence aloft on the outer edge of Hurricane Michael as it made landfall at the middle of that month. We start to open the door for frosts and freezes as we head into October as well, especially the later we head into the month. The October monthly record low for the Muscle Shoals reporting site is 23 degrees from back in 1917, and our average first frost/freeze around this area comes in late October.
October is usually one of the driest months of the year in our area, with the average monthly precipitation coming in at just under 3.5″. That doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally see heavy rain though, especially if an infrequent landfalling October tropical system gets involved. And while we haven’t officially measured accumulating snow at that Muscle Shoals climate reporting site in the month of October, we certainly have been known to have flurries on occasion as early as the end of October, and that has happened a few different times within just the past 5 to 10 years!
As cold fronts begin to come down with the southward migration of the jet stream, that means we have to start turning our attention back toward severe storm potential as we head through October. While October isn’t an overly active month for tornadoes, historically speaking, we can occasionally get tornadoes (including significant ones). For instance, on the evening of October 24, 1967, two intense F3 tornadoes struck Lauderdale and Colbert Counties in northwest Alabama. One of the F3 tornadoes hit the north side of Florence proper. Between the two F3 tornadoes that evening, 4 people were injured, but luckily no fatalities. Farther back, a significant tornado event on October 14, 1909 produced two F2 tornadoes and an F3 tornado within our viewing area, resulting in 25 fatalities and 87 injuries. While it is typically November when we often see the tornado season begin to ramp up, that can sometimes come a few weeks early and begin in October instead.
We also still have to keep an eye on the tropics as we make our way through October. The Atlantic hurricane season runs through the end of November, and while we are on the downhill swing in October, the first half of the month is statistically more active than July and the first part of August! The majority of tropical systems in October recurve out into the open Atlantic, but that is not always the case. A secondary favored breeding ground for October tropical systems is the eastern half of the Gulf down into the northwest Caribbean. These systems usually get brought northward ahead of cold fronts and upper-level systems advancing across the United States. One only has to think back to storms such as Michael in 2018 and Opal in 1995 to realize what the month of October is capable of in the Gulf, and occasionally, such systems bring inland impacts to us here in the Tennessee Valley.
