North Carolina
Has anybody spent November and December in North Carolina ? Like to know what the temperature would be like for those to months.. And would South Carolina be better . Thanks for any information on t...
Forum Discussion
PackerBacker wrote:
We also have friends in the Daytona area but their weather hasn't been all that much warmer than our's in the past 2-3 years.
Hi Eric:
We would have loved to winter in Myrtle Beach area, however, friends of ours that have wintered there for ~15 years warned us that it snows fairly regularly (about once every 2 to 3 years). We checked the official records, and yes, since 1940, here are the snow falls on Myrtle Beach:
Myrtle Beach has had 45 snow-days from 1940 to 2014; for a total of 77 inches. The snow-day interval is about every 2.2 years; the standard deviation per snow-day event is 3 inches. They had 9 inches in Feb 1973; 7 inches in March 1983; a whopping 14 inch blizzard in December 1989. The mean number of snow events per year since 1940 is 0.25 (frequency). Unfortunately, all the snow events since 1940 have been surrounded by some pretty brutal cold snaps lasting several months. For us, the most miserable thing that could happen to us as snowbirds, is ice storms. Unfortunately, South Carolina (the Myrtle to Wilmington areas) have as many ice storms as snowfalls (a surprising number catastrophic ice storms it appears), to fill in the years when it isn't snowing: 46 ice storms. The frequency of severe ice storms is 1 every 9.7 years; the frequency of moderate ice storms is 1 every 2.1 years.
Lets compare this to the closest "snowbird destination" in North Florida (on the Atlantic coast):
It has snowed only twice; once in 1917 (2 inches), and once in 1951. Tampa even got a dusting in 1917. So, the chance of snow in St Augustine (let alone a Carolinas blizzard) is infinitesimally small compared with Myrtle Beach (Myrtle once every ~2.2 years). This being said, the continuous snows that do happen in Myrtle are only from 1 day to 4 days long. So, if you balance this with any compelling personal reasons to winter in Myrle (like majority of friends wintering there; etc; etc), some will take this chance.
I haven't done the statistics for temperatures in Myrtle to plunge below freezing from December till end of March yet...
For us, it is north Florida (St Augustine).
