November has arrived! Ten months down and two more to get through before we are at the end of 2024. This year has certainly flown by! We’ve just come out of spooky season, and next up are Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, and some of our big college rivalry football games, before we head full long into the Christmas season. Now that we are into a new month, it’s time to take a look at climatological stats to see what November can bring to our part of the Tennessee Valley in terms of weather conditions. Most of you local followers know how this works by now. We don’t have climate reporting sites over every square inch of the area. The stats we have won’t capture every single record high or low or record rainfall that’s ever happened in every single little town in the viewing area. That’s physically impossible. The NWS climate reporting site that is centrally located in our viewing area and does the best job of representing the overall stats in our part of southern middle Tennessee, northwest Alabama, and far northeast Mississippi is the reporting station at the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals. Those are the stats we will use…
As you would expect, we continue our downhill slide in terms of temperatures across the Tennessee Valley during the month of November. The average high for the month overall comes in just shy of 64 degrees, and the monthly average low right around 41. Those high/low values start at 69/45 respectively at the beginning of the month before making it down to 57/38 for an average daily high/low as we end November and get ready to head into December. We can certainly still be very warm at times though, especially in the first half of the month. The Muscle Shoals reporting site has never officially hit 90 degrees or higher in November, but it did come close in 2016 with a monthly record high of 89 degrees! Admittedly, that came right on November 1st, but we have seen 80s in the month all the way into the final month of November! It can also get very cold here on occasion too! While our average overnight low is in the 40s to upper 30s through the month, it is certainly normal for us to have regular frosts and freezes in November, and climatologically speaking, our first frost/freeze event happens across the area between the last 10 days of October and the first five days of November. The monthly record low temperature is a whopping 2 degrees, set back in 1950!
As we head into cooler weather, that means that the main polar branch of the upper-level jet stream is getting more active and heading south. Because of that, we are entering our “wet season” here in the Tennessee Valley as we head into November. In most years, rain events start to become more frequent as we make the transition from October to November. The normal monthly precipitation for the area is 4.15 inches. November also rings in the part of the fall/winter stretch when we seem to be able to occasionally see impactful snow/ice accumulations, although it’s pretty rare to have it happen here as early as November. However, as an example, the maximum record snow for Muscle Shoals in November is 5.5 inches, set in 1929. The chances of accumulating snow and ice climatologically increase much more beginning in December and really ramping up in the first few months of the new year.
That southward shift of the jet stream and active ramp up of the storm track also means a ramp up in severe weather chances. November begins our tornado season here in the Tennessee Valley and “Dixie Alley” that runs from November through May. Tornado records across Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi since as far back as the 1860s show a significant ramp up in frequency of events once we head into the month of November. In fact, while the season as a whole runs from November through May, aside from the main peak that happens in spring, the secondary peak of the season, climatologically , is the month of November itself. While, even during what we would consider an active fall, we usually don’t see severe weather patterns in November where you get a threat every few days like you can in March and April, when we do have tornadoes in November around here, they can often come as part of full blown tornado outbreaks. And, as you can imagine, those tornadoes in those outbreaks can be just as intense and violent as anything we see during the spring. Our part of the Southeast has a long history with strong to violent tornadoes (EF2 and greater intensity) in the month of November, and a few of those have included F4 intensity events. The “Airport Road” F4 tornado in Huntsville on November 15, 1989 is one such violent and deadly tornado that sticks out in the minds of many Tennessee Valley residents when you start thinking about intense tornadoes during the month in history, but there have been plenty of others.
While we are on the last leg of the Atlantic hurricane season by the time we get to November, it does not officially end until the end of the month. Seeing a couple of tropical storms or even hurricanes in the Atlantic basin during the month of November would be absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Typical formation zones in November stretch from the western Caribbean up through the Bahamas and across the west-central Atlantic. That usually means that the majority of those systems get caught up in the jet stream as it moves southward across the U.S. and they get carried northeastward and away from the Lower 48 United States. The jet stream winds advancing southward adds increased wind shear in the Gulf of Mexico and near the Southeast coast, which is hostile to tropical systems. The waters near the coastline are also usually cooling below that critical 80 degree threshold with time, even when those sea surface temperatures are running warmer than average. Still, a tropical storm or even hurricane CAN occasionally impact the U.S. coastline, and even in the Gulf of Mexico. For instance, we’ve had a hurricane making landfall in the U.S. in November as recently as the 2022 season. Hurricane Nicole made landfall south of Vero Beach in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Kate in 1985 is a much stronger example, maxing out as a Category 3 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico before weakening upon approach and making landfall in the Florida panhandle near Mexico Beach at Category 2 intensity. Seeing a couple or few more tropical systems in the Atlantic basin this month, or even having another Gulf of Mexico system or U.S. landfall… while something that doesn’t happen frequently… wouldn’t be unheard of at all based on climatological and historical records.
