While it might not always seem like it, this growing season should be relatively steady, says Drew Lerner, senior agricultural meteorologist and president of World Weather. He shared insights into how the growing season will unfold during an April 4 presentation with the U.S. Apple Association.
Though parts of the U.S. have experienced periods of dryness in the past 30 days, Lerner said he does not see it impacting major apple production areas of the country. California, for the second year in a row, has good soil moisture.
“It’s a very good start to the growing season,” he said.
Lerner said the El Niño pattern will diminish during this growing season and move into a La Niña. He noted that since November 2023 temperatures have dropped significantly every 47 to 50 days, adding that this will likely occur again in the later part of April.
“There’s going to be a pooling of cooler air in western U.S. and western Canada around April 20, and it will work its way to the Southeast during our last week of April,” Lerner said.
This could spell trouble for fruit growers whose trees and buds have started to swell or bloom.
“We could see frost and freezes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and all of that production area in the last 10 days of April,” he said. “Now, it’s possible that we won’t be that warm to stimulate blossom, bud swelling or even some early flowering. I’m just a little concerned that we’re going to have some nice weather.”
With the weather patterns lately, trees are ready to flower, and if it starts to warm up, “in many areas, we might just get to the point where we start flowering,” Lerner said.
He predicts California and Washington will not have extreme heat as seen in the recent past.
“We will have some moments where it’ll get warmer than normal and maybe be a little stressful for a short period of time, but there should not be a persistence of hot, dry weather — or at least hot weather — out across California during this growing season coming up,” Lerner said. “[In the Pacific Northwest], we will probably do just fine on temperatures. We’re certainly not going to see another year of 120-degree temperatures across that region. We could get hot for a short period, but nothing close to what occurred a couple of years ago.”
He expects summer to have normal precipitation in the western part of the country, while the East might have more volatility with storms.
“There’s some areas in New York and Pennsylvania that will be notably wet,” Lerner said. “While it’s a little drier in Ohio and points southward into the Carolinas.”
Early fall should be drier; there’s a higher chance of rain as the season turns to October and November, but he said he doesn’t see it disrupting harvest.
“We will expect it to turn wetter, but the more extreme the heat and dryness is over the summer in the middle of North America, the more prolonged the good weather will be into the autumn,” he said.
