Late spring reasons to visit Santa Rosa Beach

Ahhhh, spring weather has brought April blossoms to many locales and the memories of the "zombie" winter are fading. Not so fast though...the cold air looks to make yet another southern incursion over the eastern half of the U.S. during the next ten days or so. Granted, the air won't be as cold as it was during January or February but many folks will wonder where the spring weather disappeared to.

The indicators of this baleful news involve two "teleconnection" indices known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Basically they are forecast values that indicate what the near term weather pattern will be like. Here are graphs of each over the past few months and projected into the near future:

Note that both indices show a significant drop into the negative range into the first week of May. This drop rivals or exceeds the negative values over most of the past winter months. Negative springtime values for both the AO and NAO basically means colder than average weather over the eastern U.S. Thus the end of April and the beginning of May will feature a lot of folks wishing for warmer weather.

Enter Santa Rosa Beach!! Through the middle of next week temperatures will range from the mid-70s during the day to the mid-60s at night with a few afternoon showers and thunderstorms thrown in. And even if the cold air pours southward to the Gulf of Mexico - as it looks by late next week - it will be quite a bit warmer here than further north. So make your plans to c'mon down and evade the latest variant of our "zombie" winter!!