Unusual Coastal Weather
Weather on the North Carolina coast is very unpredictable except you can count on hot weather in July and great weather in the fall.
In a post in the winter of 2016, I wrote “Our temperatures were well into the seventies on this year’s first day of December.” The next year, we enjoyed an even nicer fall.
On December 5, 2017, at our dock, three miles up the White Oak River from Swansboro, the temperature hit 70F . Wearing shorts and t-shirt I spread mulch and put down pine straw for a few hours. I never got cold. The weather was great for much of the fall months. We only got three-quarters of an inch of rain during November. There was no killing frost at our place as of December 6, 2017.
That day we picked green beans and the last of our tomatoes. Over that first weekend of December, I picked most of our pepper crop. Earlier in the week I pulled out most of our persistent tomatoes. We enjoyed a ripe tomato from our plants every month for the last sixteen months and our green ones us carried another month into January 2018.
We spend a lot more time thinking about beaches and warm waters than we do about snow. On the afternoon of December 23, 2017, our outside temperature peaked at seventy degrees Fahrenheit. We were hosting a Christmas party, but I ended up dressed for the weather with shorts and t-shirt.
Since that December warmth, we got a dose of winter weather unlike any that we have experienced since we moved down here in September 2006. It has made me look back fondly on that first winter when we recorded only 19 hours of below freezing temperatures for the whole winter.
I can assure you that we got more cold hours than that on Friday, January 5, 2018. That day the temperature might have gotten to 34 degrees between two and three PM. The Saturday and Sunday after that were even worse. The temperatures did not get above freezing.
We are not strangers to cold weather, some ice or even a little taste of snow, but this is beach country. Most of us are here because we love the water but are not so fond of frozen precipitation. The last measurable snow before our January 2018 snowfall of four inches was seven years earlier in January 2011. That was a normal storm for us. The snow came, we enjoyed it for a few hours and it disappeared. Our January 2018, snow hung around for a few days.
Most of us hoped that January 2018 snowfall would be the last of the cold weather. Our hopes were raised unrealistically high by some very warm weather the last couple of weeks of February. I rode my bike in shorts and it even felt like early beach weather. We were all sure that spring was here to stay but it was not to be. March has been a very cold month. Our March temperatures in Carteret County have been three to five degrees below normal for the whole month.
What is worse is the cold has continued into April. We have had a couple of April days when the high temperature did not get above 50F. That is winter weather for the coast. Fortunately, we have had a couple of nice days including April 8 when I took the picture above as we enjoyed an afternoon at the beach with our grandchildren. It was great except when I had to wade into the surf and endure the 50F water temperatures.
The good news is that our weather pattern appears to be changing and that it looks like warmer temperatures will be here before the middle of April. It will be a welcome change from what has been a long siege of colder than normal weather.
All the other elements of spring are here. We are enjoying lettuce from our gardens and the local strawberries are ripe. It is nice to see the weather back on track
Summer weather in October is pretty standard, and some beach weather is normal in November, and even shorts weather is not that unusual in December. January beach days are not out of the realm of possibility here. A cool spring is not unusual but a cold one is.
Living by the water tempers our weather and we take advantage of it in all seasons. It is normal for me to go kayaking in April so I am ready for the warmth.