Major cold wave brings winter back to Great Lakes and East.

[Adam Griffin]

The current forecasts here (in very far NW Georgia) have the lowest low being tomorrow night; 37. There'll be several nights where the lows are in between 40 to 45. This really doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary for what we'd experience in late-March/early-April. When I heard about the "POLAR VORTEX", I thought "oh no", but it's a joke in terms of the cold that we're going to experience.

It has been quite a bit warmer here than average since the middle of February. Since February 15 or so, we've had relatively very few days below 50-55 (many of them above 70, including a couple at 80 or more) and just sporadic groupings of a day or two at a time where frost was a worry. Since 2/15, we've only had at or below freezing night-time temps 6 or 7 times.

I placed all of my frost-sensitive plants outside at some point in the first few days of March. I brought them in for a night or two a couple of weeks ago just as a precautionary thing, since one night was going to be potentially freezing, but I put them outside again after that. I don't think 37 is going to be enough to nip 'em, especially if it's just for one night. Usually, you can't put plants out down here until the third week of April or so without having to chronically bring them back inside. This winter has been the mildest since 2011-12, when we had our last frost freakishly early (like late January/early February).