JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) – East Tennessee State University’s Climate Office expects Northeast Tennessee to see a warmer-than-average spring in 2024.
Spring officially began March 19, and despite a cold first weekend in April, climatologists anticipate temperatures to stay high.
Dr. Andrew Joyner is an associate professor in ETSU’s Department of Geosciences and also serves as the State of Tennessee’s official climatologist. Joyner told News Channel 11 Wednesday that the season will likely be both warmer and wetter than usual.
“The prediction here is that you’re going to have a warmer and wetter spring,” Joyner said. “That’s based on the Climate Prediction Center forecast from NOAA, as well as our transition to La Niña. So we’re in El Niño for a while, which typically with Tennessee, we have this battleground between wet and dry with La Niña, usually a more clear signal with warm and wet for Tennessee.”
Those warmer temperatures primarily refer to the region’s lower elevations, and Joyner advised that the prediction doesn’t mean an occasional cold snap won’t occur. While the overall prediction calls for warmth and rain, Joyner said there will always be outlier periods of time.
“These are macro atmospheric patterns, big patterns that control our weather and overall climate,” Joyner said. “Certainly, there’s going to be probably dry periods and wetter periods, but we definitely think the overall pattern, especially with La Niña, is warm and wet and probably increasingly so throughout the year.”
The rest of April will likely see a steady stream of rain through the month, according to the climate office’s prediction. Joyner and other climatologists expect the increased precipitation trend to last through June when summer begins.
Joyner told News Channel 11 the warm and wet season could continue through the year and possibly enhance the potential for tropical severe weather and a fall full of rain.
As far as pollen and allergies go, Joyner doesn’t expect people in the Tri-Cities to notice any abnormal bouts.
“I don’t know if it’ll be too noticeable in that direction,” Joyner said. “I think really the wetness is probably the bigger factor there that people will notice. I don’t know if there will be too much of an impact on their pollen season.”
Joyner said 2023 also experienced a rainy spring, but a few weeks in June were exceptionally dry and led to a direct impact on the area’s corn growth.
“But certainly, the expectation is that that I don’t expect us to see too much drought from most of the rest of the East, at least for the next several months, for sure.”
According to Joyner, too much rain could make sowing crops difficult for farmers, and harvesting hay could also face challenges.
“A lot of folks do their first hay cut in May, late usually sometime in May, sometimes early June, depending on the weather. So if you wait to have a couple of weeks where it’s too wet to do the hay, then that hay crops are gone and so that would be a concern if were too wet for the farmers in our area.”
