Coming off one of the hottest Aprils on record, May did not take long to freeze.
Danville’s low of 32 on Sunday made for the coldest May 3 low and fourth latest spring freeze on record. Several locations dropped into the 30-32 range on Sunday morning, and nearly everywhere in Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area was at least in the 30s.
It was also Danville’s third driest April in over a century of records with barely half an inch (0.52 inch). A fairly widespread dose of showers managed to dump ½ to 1 ¼ inches of rain on many locations along and west of the Blue Ridge last week, lifting many of those locations out of the bottom few driest Aprils on record, but barely settled the dust to the east in much of Southside and Central Virginia. A stripe of red “extreme drought” pokes into that region on the latest U.S. Drought Monitor map for Virginia.
Widespread showers across Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia on this Wednesday and Thursday ahead of another cold front will quell a quick spike of warmth earlier this week. It will be a welcome rain for the long-lasting severe to extreme drought but, again, drops in the bucket of what is needed, as we discussed here last week.
As expected, a cooler, damper weather pattern has settled in for the first half of May.
While it doesn’t look likely to provide drought-ending soaking rains, the southerly digging jet stream over the eastern U.S. has, for now, quelled the early summerlike heat of a roasting April.
Warmest April on record for many
Preliminary data suggests this was likely the warmest April on record nationally, with the most intensely focused warmth relative to normal in the Ohio Valley and South stretching into our region. That shifted east from the Western U.S. where it reigned in March, and appears to be returning for much of May.
Locations in and near Southwest and Southside Virginia experiencing their warmest April on record included:
· Roanoke, 62.3-degree average, records dating back to 1912
· Hot Springs, 57.6-degree average, records dating back to 1893
· John H. Kerr Dam, 65.9-degree average, records dating back to 1948
· Appomattox, 62.4-degree average, records dating back to 1962
· Clintwood, 57.8-degree average, records dating back to 1994
It was among the warmest few at several other locations in Southwest and Southside Virginia.
As noted, it was Danville’s second warmest April (62.8 degrees) and the same ranking for Wytheville (57.4), Blacksburg’s third warmest (56.6), tied for Lynchburg’s fourth warmest (61.0), and sixth warmest at Burke’s Garden (53.0). Each of these sites has a century or more of almost continuous weather records. (Wytheville has 97 years, close enough.)
It was also the second warmest April on record at South Boston (62.7, records being 1978), Abingdon (59.4, records begin 1970) and Galax (55.8, records begin 2000).
You get the point. It was the warmest or one of the warmest Aprils in the lifetime of existing weather data across our entire region, averaging about 5 degrees warmer than a median April over the past century would.
Recent Aprils have also been warm
Adding more context to this April’s warmth are the other Aprils that rank near or just above or below this one.
For instance, at Roanoke, April 2017 is second warmest, April 2024 is tied for third, April 2025 is fifth, and nine of the 20 warmest Aprils in 114 years of weather data have occurred 2010 or later.
At Lynchburg, even though weather data goes back to 1892, six of the 20 warmest Aprils have happened in just the last nine years.
At the John H. Kerr Dam, 2017 had the second warmest April, 2025 the third warmest, 2024 the fifth warmest — in fact, nine of the 11 warmest Aprils in almost 80 years of weather records have happened since 2010.
Abingdon’s second warmest April just completed was only beat by April 2023 that was 1.2 degrees warmer, with April 2017 ranked fourth and April 2025 fifth in 56 years of data.
We could go on, but again, you get the point.
While 1985 and 1941 (weird temperature year with our hottest weather in May and October) often show up among the warmest Aprils at various locations, a disproportionate number of our region’s warmest Aprils have happened in recent years rather than the distant past.
Often, discussions of changing climate run toward how hot summer days get and how much it snows in winter.
But a more telling signal may be what is happening in the shoulder months between the year’s extremes.
There appears to be ample evidence that warm and even hot weather is happening more often in our region during the month of April in the past couple of decades than had occurred previously.
May temperatures not tracking like April
January and February were generally colder than normal across our region, while March and April were warmer than normal, April being very much so.
May has started out sharply cooler than normal, and appears likely to continue being generally cooler than normal most of the time through mid-month as the weather pattern has shifted to something resembling what we had in much of January and February with strong blocking high pressure in the northern latitudes buckling the jet stream southward over the Eastern U.S.
Beyond that, the picture gets blurry, and definitely so for the summer ahead. The expected development of an El Niño might tilt the odds slightly toward a somewhat cooler, wetter summer, which many would welcome, but of course that is vague at this point.
Later this month, we’ll open the floor for guesses on what the summer’s hottest temperatures will be in the annual Cardinal Weather summer heat prediction contest.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
To submit a photo, send it to weather@cardinalnews.org or tweet it to @CardinalNewsVa or @KevinMyattWx. Please identify the location and date of the photo with each submission.
Sign up for his weekly newsletter:
