Thursday, June 19, 2025–10:15 a.m.
-David Crowder, WRGA News-
It has been an unusually wet and stormy May and June in Northwest Georgia, and there is a reason for that.
According to Sid King, Lead Meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City, normally, the jet stream tends to be positioned well to the north of Georgia, but this year, the upper and middle atmospheric levels of the jet stream have tended to notch southward.
Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, you still have what’s called the Bermuda high pressure that helps funnel warm and moist air from the Gulf into the southeast.
“The jet stream will help storm systems become more organized, and then move through the Tennessee Valley and into Georgia,” King said. “That’s given us more organized rain chances and funnel systems like we would see in the early and middle spring. That, combined with the hot weather and all of the humidity from the Gulf, is giving us torrential rain rates.”
What we normally see this time of year are pop-up summertime thunderstorms. However, when you have funnel systems coming from the low-pressure system associated with the jet stream along the southerly flow–low-level flow from the Gulf, you get some shear for these storms to work with.
“That helps for the potential for not only damaging straight-line winds, but also spin-up tornadoes,” King added. “We have seen that. There were three of them in Gordon County. We had a couple more in Carroll County a few weeks ago. We had one down here in Coweta County as well.”
According to King, a change is on the way.
“I mentioned that jet stream pattern earlier,” he said. The low-pressure part of it is finally going to move off to the east, and we are going to have a deep high-pressure regime set up over the eastern United States. This is going to lead us to a drier and hotter pattern as we go into the weekend and the early parts of next week.”
We had over 11 inches of rain in May. The normal amount is around 3.4 inches.
In June, we’ve only had four days without rain.
King was a guest on Thursday’s First News with Doug Walker on WRGA.