MEMPHIS, Tenn. — We are just about a week away from the solar total eclipse in the Mid-South. We know the eclipse is happening on April 8th but the only question that remains is the weather that we can expect on that Monday.
When viewing a solar eclipse clear skies or high clouds are preferable for viewing the event. While we are starting to get and idea of what things may look like, we can look at our past to see how other early Aprils have looked over the past few years.
Spring is typically a very active season in the South. Warm air is being brought in from the Gulf of Mexico as the last remains of winter cold retreat to the north. This normally results in a lot of storm systems which is why Spring is our main severe weather season. This also translates to a lot of cloud cover. The graphic below shows cloud data from 1977 to 2022 for the beginning of April. Overall, here in the Mid-South, we typically can expect 40-50% of our days to be cloudy. That is quite a bit compared to some other times of the year.
This makes it a bit tricky when it comes to getting clear weather for the total eclipse. We can look more specifically here in Memphis over the past decade to get a bit of a better idea of what this looks like. Using satellite data since 2014, only 4 of the past 10 years have been partly cloudy, mostly sunny, or sunny. Not good odds, which backs the overall climatology.