ATLANTA CLIMATE – DOES IT SNOW IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA?

Hey – it’s Parker your favorite Atlanta Realtor! I’m here to answer the question:  does Georgia have four seasons? Is hot Atlanta really hot all year long? Well i’m about to give you a taste of what the weather is like in Atlanta, Georgia.

Let’s get going! Atlanta, unlike Chicago, for example, doesn’t have a strict four seasons. We have a lot of unseasonably warm days in the winter, and we have a lot of very nice cool days in the summer. I like to say that we have endless spring, a very short summer, then endless fall and a very short winter.  And then it’s back to endless spring!

Winter most years – there’s not much of a winter in Atlanta.  It may start to get cold mid-December, or it may not.  January is usually our coldest month, and honestly, by February, you usually start to see daffodils poking out of the ground. Most winters in Atlanta don’t even require a heavy coat! Most years you can get by with just sweaters or a light jacket or a puffy vest. I mean it just really doesn’t get that cold in Atlanta.

Again, we don’t get snow every year and most years if we get snow it’s just a very light dusting, but every five years or so, we get a major snowstorm that comes into Atlanta.

The most recent time this happened was back in 2014 in the humiliating episode known as Snowpocalypse. Let me tell you about Snowpocalypse:  late in January 2014 we had some sub-freezing weather and it began to snow heavily. This is rare in Atlanta, it actually started to stick very heavily especially on the roads. It was the middle of the day, and the schools decided to send the kids home early, then all the businesses told their employees to head home, and within hours we had a classic Atlanta highway traffic jam in the middle of a 20-year snowstorm!!!

There were over 800 traffic accidents! People were stranded in their cars, or at work. People ended up sleeping on their desks and on the floors in grocery stores, and because of this debacle, lots of people made fun of Atlanta – even Saturday night live took a few digs at us!

We also get these incredible ice storms where we get freezing rain that sticks to all of the power lines and the tree branches, and it can knock the power out for days on end. So anytime snow or ice is predicted, everyone freaks out and buys up all the milk and bread and all the beer. But again, most winters don’t see anything more than a light dusting of snow. It’s just not that cold here!

The good news is spring is always right around the corner in Atlanta, and when it arrives it seems to last forever. In mid-January, the camellias start to bloom, and over the next four or five months, it’s just this endless unfolding of beautiful flowers and plants and all of our wonderful trees. It’s a gorgeous time to be in Atlanta.

The only thing wrong with spring in Atlanta is the pollen! If you have pollen allergies, Atlanta can be a rough ride! During spring pollen season, we have days where the trees are just pumping out so much pollen it blows around in huge yellow clouds. But other than the pollen, spring in Atlanta is de lovely.

If you like what we’re doing here, please like, comment and subscribe – preferably all three! Let’s get back to it! Unfortunately, spring always comes to an end, and then it’s summer! And it’s hot most summer days! It can be in the high 80s to low 90s, and it can very occasionally get up into the 100s! Add to that 65-70% humidity, and it gets sticky real fast!!!

Now, all this heat and humidity ends up driving these incredible summer afternoon thunder showers. If you come from an arid climate where it just doesn’t rain much, you may never have seen rain like it rains in Georgia! These thunderstorms usually blow out pretty quickly and they can actually turn a 90 plus degree day into a very very cool evening. The rain just pours down out of the sky and just washes away the heat. You’ve heard the old saying it’s not the heat it’s the humidity? Well, what we experience as heat most of the time in Atlanta is actually just excess humidity. Yesterday was August 8th, I was out with my dog in the middle of the day, and the weather was perfect! I checked the humidity and it was only 53 percent. Two hours later, I was getting ready to play tennis, and it was a total sweat box – very muggy, and I checked again, and the temperature had actually dropped a couple of degrees, but the humidity had gone up to 57%! I honestly had no idea that such a small increase in the humidity could have such a dramatic effect, and the crazy thing was it happened in two hours! It went from being very pleasant and very dry feeling, to all the sudden, very very muggy! And it was only a four percent increase in the humidity!!! I always say that Atlanta is hot but it’s not Florida hot! If you’ve ever been to Florida, you know how suffocating it can get with the heat and the humidity down there! So, by comparison, Atlanta’s just not that hot!