I am talking with Corey Davis from the State Climate Office of North Carolina, time to take a look back over October. And I think it could be summed up in a couple of words: Dry October, certainly, and a lot of places pretty warm, but what’s your perspective, Corey?

“Yeah, Mike, that’s pretty much spot on with what we’re seeing now that we are getting that final October data in from weather stations across North and South Carolina. One of the most noteworthy spots that pops out is down in Columbia, South Carolina, they finished the month with zero measurable rainfall, only a trace of rain for the entire month, and that came last week, and that was an event that surprised some folks. We got a little bit more rain from that than we expected, but again, in areas like Columbia, just no moisture, no rain from that event. This is now the third time in Columbia’s history that they’ve made it through in October with zero total rainfall. And you know, the story wasn’t much better elsewhere. We’re looking at just a 100th of an inch in Fayetteville, just three hundredths out in Asheville, only about a 10th of an inch in the Raleigh area and down in Wilmington. So you know, coming off that September where our totals are more like 810, 20 inches in some spots, this was a huge turnaround from one month to the next.”

Let’s talk about the agricultural impacts of this warm and dry October. What are you seeing and hearing from across this the Carolinas?

“Well, knowing how dry it’s been, I think the farmers are actually in surprisingly good shape. Of course, this is that time of the year where they want to be out in the fields getting their harvest done, and they’ve been able to make really good progress over the past couple weeks, we’re seeing crops like soybeans that are coming out of the ground a little bit ahead of schedule. And thinking back to where we were at this point last year, we were in a pretty similar dry spell in October into early November. At a certain point, some of the soybean growers said they were just stopping the harvest because the crops were getting so dry that they were worried about those seed pods just shattering. Well, we haven’t heard any concerns about that this year, and it seems like because we’re making a little bit better progress getting those soybeans harvested, that may not be as much of a concern, even if it stays dry for a couple more weeks. Aside from that, down in South Carolina this week, we’ve heard that the yields have been surprisingly good so far, a little bit better than they expected for some of the field crops coming out of the ground. I think the one big impact that the dry weather has had is on some of that small grain planting, and especially up in northeastern North Carolina, the Elizabeth City area, we’re now seeing moderate drought on the map in that corner of the state, and we’ve heard that some of the growers there have just stopped seeding small grains at this point because there’s so little soil, soil moisture present, and just no guarantees that that seed would germinate.”

Any idea of a change coming up? Are we going to stay this warm? What’s the forecast look like?

“We’ve got one more warm day coming up today, again, high temperatures up near 80, even into the low 80 is further south and east. That’ll continue this warm trend that we’ve seen all week. You know, yesterday we were up in the mid 80s on Halloween, near record highs for that day of the year. But we do have a cold front that’s going to sneak in from the north tonight that’ll bring also just a very small chance of showers. We’re probably not looking at more than a 10th of an inch or two out of this system, but it will knock our temperatures back a little bit through the weekend. We’re looking at low to mid 70s instead of 80s on Saturday and Sunday, and our temperatures will finally start to creep back up early next week. It looks like by next Wednesday, we may be in the 80s again. And Mike, this time of the year, our average highs are around 70, even in the upper 60s in some areas. So that puts us 10 to 15 degrees above normal when we’re running up in the 80s. So a warm start to November, and again, a dry one as well. Since that system tonight doesn’t look like it’s going To have a lot of rain with it.”