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Any address, any day. Up to 9 days out, it’s our forecast. Further out, an extended forecast from 30 years of weather here.
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Our automated weather channel is on the air around the clock: the radar, the temperatures, the week ahead — and when a warning hits the Valley, it stays with the storm.
Tropical Outlook Stays Away From the Gulf as El Nino Shapes Our Winter
Is there a tropical system headed for the Gulf or Georgia right now?
No, the National Hurricane Center lists nothing in the Gulf and the only Atlantic area it is watching is a weak low expected to drift out to sea well east of the Bahamas, so there is no tropical threat to Columbus or the Chattahoochee Valley.
Photo: Julia Filirovska / Pexels
Stand on the Chattahoochee RiverWalk between Columbus and Phenix City on a November morning and the breeze coming up the water has nothing to do with the tropics. It is worth saying plainly, because this is the time of year people start asking: the National Hurricane Center's Monday evening outlook flagged exactly one area in the Atlantic, and it is a long way from here and headed the wrong way to matter.
Forecasters in Miami expect an area of low pressure to form along a weakening frontal boundary a few hundred miles northeast of the Bahamas in a day or so. It could take on some subtropical characteristics late this week while it drifts over the western Atlantic. A subtropical system is a hybrid, part ordinary frontal low with its cold core aloft and part warm, tropical-style storm, which is why forecasters hedge on what to call one. The chances of it developing at all are low, and the Hurricane Center says those chances should end by the weekend, when the system is expected to move east or northeast into an environment that will not support it.
The Gulf section of the same outlook is the one that matters in this viewing area, because a system there is the kind that can still be throwing rain and wind at Eufaula, Cuthbert or Lumpkin a day later. On Monday evening, the Hurricane Center listed nothing in the Gulf at all.
The thing actually worth watching this cold season is not in the Atlantic. It is in the Pacific, where a very strong El Nino is in place, with an index value of 2.16. Warm water along the equator feeds energy into the subtropical jet stream, the fast river of air that runs across the southern United States in winter. Strengthen that jet and you build a conveyor belt that steers one storm system after another across Alabama and Georgia instead of letting them pass to the north.
In the record, that pattern has usually meant a wetter and often cooler cold season along the Gulf South, with more systems crossing the region and a raised risk of severe weather in the Gulf states. The Climate Prediction Center leans the same way for November, December and January here, giving a 60 percent chance of above-normal precipitation, with temperatures most likely to finish near normal. Look further out to February, March and April and the outlook makes no call either way.
For people in Hamilton, Manchester, Tuskegee, Opelika and LaGrange, that is a planning fact rather than a forecast. A wet winter does not arrive as one long drizzle; it arrives as individual storm systems, several weeks apart, any one of which can show up after dark. Now is the cheap and easy time to clear the gutters, check that the yard drains away from the house, and make sure there is something in the bedroom that will wake you up when a warning is issued, whether that is a weather radio or a phone with alerts switched on and the volume up.
This year, the map to keep half an eye on is the Pacific, not the Atlantic.
Right now in Columbus, Georgia
71°Temperature
60°Dew point
69%Humidity
8 mphWind — east
30.12"Pressure
The next seven days
Day
High
Low
Rain
Conditions
TONIGHT
—
62°
2%
Partly Cloudy
TUE
81°
66°
14%
Mostly Cloudy
WED
80°
63°
89%
Showers And Thunderstorms
THU
80°
53°
17%
Slight Chance Rain Showers then Mostly Sunny
FRI
77°
49°
10%
Mostly Sunny
SAT
74°
45°
5%
Mostly Sunny
SUN
71°
44°
15%
Mostly Sunny then Slight Chance Rain Showers
Written by the CNAW2 weather desk from CNAW2 weather desk data. Last updated November 2, 2026 at 6:53 PM Eastern. Covering Columbus and Phenix City, Auburn–Opelika, LaGrange, Eufaula and the rest of the 19-county CNAW viewing area.
