We start off the new month by taking a look back at June weather stats from our corner of the Tennessee Valley. For this, we use data from the NWS climate reporting station at the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals. It is the closest NWS climate reporting station that is centrally located in the heart of our viewing area, and although it is in northwest Alabama, its stats do a good job of representing the overall weather conditions and climatology in southern middle Tennessee as well.
For the first two days of June, we don’t have any data reported because of a lightning-related communication issue at the reporting station. However, for the majority of the month, high temperatures across the area ran either near or slightly above average… with a few below average days peppered in when widespread thunderstorms persisting through the day kept temperatures a bit cooler than normal. To go along with the muggy atmosphere, most of the overnights ran slightly above average for low temperatures, mainly associated with the muggy atmosphere not being able to cool as efficiently during the overnight. Rainfall was above average for the month, has it has been for the year so far. The Muscle Shoals airport recorded 7.41″ of rain for the month, putting it 2.36″ above the climatological normal. This brings the running total for 2025 so far to 39.14″, which is 10.1″ above normal! Most all of the viewing area overall is estimated to have seen as much as 5 to 10 inches of rain over the past 30 days, putting many areas at seeing 1.5 to twice the normal amount of rain for the month of June. That has also significantly worked on the running 365 day rainfall deficit across the area. Many locations across southern middle Tennessee had 1-year rainfall deficits of over 24 inches below normal as recently as April! Many of those values now have been brought down to just 6 to 9 inches below normal, and some locations that were at that 2 foot range just a few months ago have now caught up to being near even! With what looks to continue to be above average rainfall off and on for the foreseeable future, it is likely that these statistics will continue to improve.
Now, we look ahead to climatology stats for the month of July to get a basic idea of what is considered “average” for weather in our local area. To do that, we will continue to use stats from the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals. The monthly average daytime high for July comes in at 91.6 degrees, starting at 91 at the beginning of the month and coming in at 92 by the middle to latter part of the month. The average low temperature is 71.4 degrees. The Muscle Shoals reporting location has been as hot as 108 set back in 1930, and as cool overnight as 49 degrees, set back in 1937. The monthly normal precipitation comes in at 4.78″, still a bit on the wet side because of summer storms and the occasional tropical disturbance, but not as wet as the spring months as thunderstorms become more spotty and random as the jet stream is farther north, taking the more organized mid-latitude weather systems with it.
With that northward shift of the jet stream comes much quieter tornado activity. The tornado count for July in our area isn’t completely zero, but there is a substantial drop in frequency beginning in June that carries through the summer months. The few tornadoes we occasionally get in July are often either small, low-end spin-up tornadoes associated with thunderstorm complexes or thunderstorms interacting with local terrain and leftover wind shift boundaries… or from the occasional landfalling tropical system on the northern Gulf Coast. Severe weather activity in our area during the month of July usually comes in the form of damaging straight-line winds… either from thunderstorm complexes moving in from the north to northwest or from the spotty afternoon pop-up storms producing localized downbursts of damaging wind gusts.
Speaking of the tropics, we are now firmly into the early portion of the Atlantic hurricane season, that begins on June 1st and runs through the end of November. July isn’t typically a very active month in the Atlantic basin, but there certainly are occasional tropical storms and even hurricanes. During the month of July, they are most likely to form in the Gulf to off the Southeast coast in association with thunderstorm complexes that move offshore and sit and develop low pressure and tropical characteristics or that interact with stalled out frontal boundaries. Another source of tropical development in July, mainly for the Gulf into the western Caribbean, is “homegrown” type activity spun off from the Central American Gyre. We occasionally see tropical waves from Africa have a chance to develop as they approach or enter the Caribbean (mainly during the latter part of the month), but this doesn’t happen as frequently… instead, becoming much more of a regular occurrence from August into September and October.
Keep in mind that landfalling tropical systems on the northern Gulf Coast can and sometimes do affect our immediate local weather here in the Tennessee Valley. Those systems can often bring heavy rain and the potential for flash flooding, gusty winds, and the potential for spin-up tornadoes.
