Macon experienced record-breaking heat in 2019. Are we on track for another warm year?

No, it wasn’t just your imagination. Macon had its warmest year on record in 2019, the National Weather Service reports.

“It’s one of those things that was the right conditions for pretty much the entire summer where we had a dominant high pressure system in the Caribbean that mostly filtered a lot of warm air into Central and Northern Georgia,” said NWS meteorologist Ty Vaughn based in Peachtree City.

“... Generally, the overall trend for that time period was warmer than average, and that happened enough, and before we know it, we’re breaking records,” he said.

The warmest average temperature for the Macon area in 2019 was 67.2 degrees, according to the NWS’s 2019 Annual Climate Summary. Normally, the average temperature for the entire year in the Macon area is 64.5 degrees, up 2.7 degrees from normal.

The prior record for Macon was set in 1990 when the average temperature was 67.0 degrees, Vaughn said.

January 2020 also has been warmer than usual so far, he said.

“It is warmer than we normally see in January,” Vaughn said. “We are expecting some colder weather in the next week or two ahead of a pretty potent cold front which is going to drop temperatures back toward their seasonal average for January.”

The average temperature for January in the Macon area is 46 degrees, Vaughn said.

However, lows in the upper 20s are expected early next week.

“We should start seeing temperatures turn back down to the lower 50s, upper 40s, by next week and that will continue to fluctuate,” Vaughn said. “On average, the Climate Predication Center has us in a potentially warmer than normal winter.

“So, that’s kind of the trend we’ve been looking at for most of the season,” he said.

This story was originally published January 15, 2020 at 9:43 AM.