Charlottesville area enjoys varied climate

Charlottesville’s climate is as diverse as Virginia’s landscape and geography and is marked by four distinct seasons that are tempered by precipitation spread rather evenly throughout the year.

Even the Charlottesville area’s foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains help provide some of the variety in climate, something former resident Thomas Jefferson knew well as he had a growing season atop Monticello Mountain that could average 20 days longer per year than colder spots at lower elevations.

Unlike taller mountains, the upper reaches of the area’s foothills can have a pleasant moderating effect that tends to extend growing seasons.
“High temperatures tend to be depressed and low temperatures tend to be moderated,” said Jerry Stenger, research coordinator for the State Climatology Office at the University of Virginia.

“About the optimum elevation around here is somewhere around the elevation of Monticello, which would explain how Mr. Jefferson was able to grow artichokes. You need a fairly long season,” Stenger said. “He did grow artichokes with a certain amount of success.”

Today, as in Jefferson’s time, area farmers are seeking specialty crops and many are finding the soils and elevations quite suitable for growing wine grapes. The counties around Charlottesville have developed a blossoming farm wine industry that thrives on both tourism and a variable climate that people variously love and hate.

“The main feature of Virginia’s climate is its variability,” Stenger said.

“There’s something for everybody to love and also something for everybody to hate,” Stenger said of a climate that marks “essentially the northern limit of the humid southern subtropical zone.”

Unlike many other areas of the country that have wetter and drier seasons, Charlottesville experiences four seasons in which moisture is “fairly well distributed during the course of the year,” Stenger said.

“We are really at a crossroads between the cold and the warm air and the drier internal [continental] air and the moister air from the ocean,” he said.
“As the seasons progress, we can come under the influence of a number of vastly different air masses,” he said.

“Typically around Central Virginia, it rains one day out of three,” he said. “We get some measurable precipitation on about 120 days every year.”

The region’s climate often is marked by dry summer periods, but hit-or-miss drenching thunderstorms also rumble through with some regularity. Moisture from summer thunderstorms and tropical systems is very important in terms of providing late summer and early fall precipitation.

But if you don’t like the weather at the moment, just wait a while.

With its four distinct seasons, the area’s weather changes often enough that rainfall - and snowfall - can vary dramatically from year to year or even month to month.

From 1998 through 2002, Charlottesville experienced one of the driest periods of the last century, “but that drought was washed away in 2003, the wettest year ever recorded, when a total of well over six feet of water fell from the sky,” Stenger said.

Snowfall varies more wildly than rainfall totals. The winter of 1995-96 dropped 54.7 inches of snow on Charlottesville, making that “our snowiest winter back to 1893,” Stenger said. “But the winter before brought us virtually none at all,” he said. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels said about one winter in every 10 is snow-free.

The area’s scenic mountains got their name from the blue haze that surrounds their peaks. The haze comes from a natural chemical released by the trees, Stenger said. The volatile compound scatters the shorter wavelengths of light, creating the blue color in the haze.

Winters in Central Virginia generally are mild, with highs in the upper 40s and lows in the upper 20s and an average temperature of 40 degrees from December to March, Stenger said.

Spring and fall are as spectacular as they are variable. On average, Central Virginia’s summers are warm, with highs in the upper 80s and lows in the 60s.
The mean temperature from June to September is 74 degrees.

“The weather here is certainly not boring,” Stenger said. “It can vary quite a bit from what we think of as normal.”