Meteorological summer will begin on June 1, and astronomical summer on June 20.

The summer forecast for Alabama usually goes something like this:

The Farmers' Almanac has been in the business of offering up long-range forecasts for decades now, and it released its outlook for the summer of 2025 this week.

The Almanac has titled this summer's forecast: The Heat is On.

Overall the Almanac is predicting "unsettled to stormy conditions for most of the country" except for the Atlantic Coast and the Florida peninsula.

Almanac forecasters said the heat will really be on starting in July and "more long-time high temperature records may be broken this year."

The Almanac is also predicting "near average" precipitation for much of the country except the Gulf Coast and southern Plains.

Those areas could have "frequent showery rains and thunderstorms."

On the flip side, the far West could be drier than average and be at risk for more wildfires, according to the Almanac.

The summer 2025 forecast for the Southeast region, which includes not only Alabama but Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida, is not unexpected: "Brutally humid and wet."

What about the rest of the nation? Here's the outlook for those regions:

Great Lakes, Ohio Valley and Midwest (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois and Wisconsin): Sultry, thunder-filled.

Northeast and New England (New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Washington D.C.): Broiling with average precipitation.

North Central U.S. (includes Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana): Scorching with average rainfall.

South Central U.S. (includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico): Sizzling, showery.

The summer outlook from the Almanac included a forecast for the Fourth of July.

For the Southeast the Almanac is expecting "big thunderstorms in Tennessee and the northern parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas."

The summer outlook also includes a hurricane forecast.

The Almanac says that the Florida Gulf Coast could face a hurricane threat by the second week of August.

The Atlantic coast could faces its own hurricane threat during the second week of September, according to the Almanac.

What about other forecasts?

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has longer-range outlooks for temperature and precipitation. Its three-month outlook (shown at the top of this post), which includes the first month of summer, is forecasting a higher probability of above-average temperatures for Alabama going into June.

The precipitation outlook, shown below, is forecasting equal chances of either above-average or below-average precipitation for Alabama: