November arrives on Saturday. It’s hard to believe we’re flying this quickly toward the end of the year, but here we are! As we head into November, we are heading into home stretch for meteorological fall here in the Tennessee Valley. Typically, the main storm track comes southward and gets more active. We shift out of what is usually a drier September and October into wetter conditions. With that, we occasionally see severe storm threats, and very occasionally, even some wintry weather! Typically, we average right around 4.15″ of precipitation for the month of November here in our part of the Tennessee Valley. It’s very infrequent that accumulating wintry precipitation gets in the mix this early, but it occasionally happens. The Muscle Shoals, Alabama airport reporting station holds a max monthly snowfall record of 5.5″, set back in 1929.
As the storm track shifts southward, that means cold fronts are blasting across! Our monthly daytime high is 63.8 degrees, with that going from 69 at the start of the month to 57 as we round out November! Our monthly average low is 41.2 degrees, with that beginning around 45 degrees before falling to 38 by the end of the month. We certainly can be warmer (or colder) than those stats though! The monthly record high for November at the Muscle Shoals reporting site at the airport is 89 set back in 2016, and conversely, the monthly record low is a whopping 2 degrees set back in 1950!
Severe storms and tornadoes are no stranger to the Tennessee Valley during the month of November. In fact, November marks the start of our tornado season here that runs from November through the end of May. Our region has seen SEVERAL strong to even violent tornadoes over the years in the month of November, including the infamous and deadly “Airport Road” F4 tornado in the Huntsville, AL area on November 15, 1989. In fact, all three of our viewing area’s larger metro areas… the Huntsville metro, the Columbia TN area, and the Shoals… have ALL had violent F4 rated tornadoes at some point over the years in the month of November! We don’t always have severe storms and tornadoes every single November, but when it happens, those events can occasionally be associated with full-scale tornado outbreaks with tornadoes just as intense as the ones that happen during the spring months!
The Atlantic hurricane season is still ongoing in November, but it’s on its last legs, with the season officially coming to a close at the end of the month. Historically speaking, we can occasionally see tropical storms and even hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, but activity usually starts to slow down considerably compared to earlier in the season. When we do see tropical systems develop in November, it is usually in an area stretching from the western Caribbean up through the western Atlantic and then back through the open waters of the central Atlantic. Those Caribbean systems can sometimes still be a United States concern, especially for the Florida peninsula area, but the risk of a landfalling major tropical system on the northern Gulf Coast drastically goes down in November thanks to the southward diving upper-level troughs and cold fronts that we get.
