Weather camera arrives as El Niño begins to build

Southern TN Weather's new Lynchburg camera gives emergency managers, farmers, and residents real-time data

2:19 p.m. June 15, 2026

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

Moore County has a new eye on the sky just as one of the world’s biggest weather patterns begins to shift.

Southern Tennessee Weather’s SkyCam Network now has a camera overlooking Lynchburg, giving the county a full 360-degree view and real-time weather data from a place that had been missing from the regional weather map.

For meteorologist Elijah Kirby, that mattered.

“Lynchburg, Moore County was one of the only counties that had zero cameras at all,” Kirby said. “So I knew that was on top of my list.”

The camera is mounted on the tower at Tanyard Hill, looking down into the holler near the Jack Daniel Distillery. It was installed through Southern Tennessee Weather’s work with HazCams, an Alabama-based company that places weather cameras across the country, with support from YouTube weather forecaster Ryan Hall.

But the heart of it is simple: Moore County needed coverage.

The camera gives forecasters, emergency managers, farmers, and residents another way to see what is happening in real time when storms move through southern Middle Tennessee. The system includes a weather sensor that tracks rainfall, rainfall rate, dew point, humidity, air pressure, and other local conditions.

That information can matter during severe weather coverage, warning coordination, advisories, and storm surveying. It also gives the National Weather Service another local reference point when storms are building or moving through the area.

“I’m really hopeful that this camera will not only help with being able to see the storms as they come in, but with the weather sensor data, I’m hoping that it will also help with the warning coordination,” Kirby said.

The sensor also tracks wet-bulb globe temperature, a heat-stress measurement used in outdoor athletics. That matters for summer practices, games, and events because dangerous heat is not just about the number on the thermometer. Humidity, sun angle, wind, and other conditions can change how hard heat hits the body.

Within three days of going online, Kirby said the Lynchburg camera had already captured a severe thunderstorm and a super bolide meteor – an exceptionally bright meteor that often explodes or fragments as it enters Earth’s atmosphere.

That is the local angle.

A bigger pattern in the Pacific

The bigger weather story is building far from Moore County, in the warm waters of the Pacific.

NOAA forecasters say El Niño has officially returned, and it could become one of the strongest on record by late fall or early winter. The Climate Prediction Center says El Niño conditions developed in early June and are expected to strengthen through the winter of 2026-27. NOAA gives the current event a 63% chance of becoming “very strong” during the November-to-January period.

El Niño is not a local forecast by itself. It is a tilt in the odds.

Kirby said the pattern is tied to warmer-than-average water in a strip of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water can help shape how moisture and air move into the United States.

“What happens on the surface of the ocean – the temperatures that you have in the ocean – can directly impact how much moisture gets lifted up into the atmosphere and transported over into the United States,” Kirby said.

For Tennessee, the early signal is worth watching carefully.

The Weather Company’s July-through-September outlook calls for hotter-than-average conditions in parts of the Northwest, northern Rockies, Texas, and Florida. But much of the country is not expected to roast the same way. The outlook also points to a wetter-than-usual late-summer pattern in the Ohio Valley.

The Ohio Valley is not Moore County, but its weather patterns often brush close enough to matter.

That does not guarantee a wet summer here. It does mean the back half of summer may have more chances for rainfall than a hard, dry pattern would offer.

For gardeners, farmers, cattle producers, hay crews, and anyone planning an outdoor event, the thing to watch will be the rhythm. A wetter pattern can help pastures and ponds, but it can also complicate hay cutting, ball schedules, festivals, and field work if storms start arriving in clusters.

Moisture is not snow

Kirby said El Niño’s bigger local influence may come later.

“Usually with El Niños, we usually get a lot wetter winter times,” Kirby said. “We usually get above-average precipitation during the winter.”

That does not automatically mean snow.

Winter weather in Middle Tennessee still needs the right match: moisture in place, cold air arriving, and timing close enough for both to matter. El Niño can help bring the moisture. It does not promise the cold.

“It has to meet up just right there at the exact right time,” Kirby said.

In winter, El Niño often gives the southern storm track more room to work. That can raise the odds of a wetter pattern across parts of the South and Southeast, including the kind of Gulf moisture that sometimes matters here.

“If we had that cold air that moves in at just the right time, it’s going to be a lot easier for us to get winter weather compared to the La Niña time, where usually we’re a little bit drier than average during the winter months,” Kirby said.

There is also a hurricane-season angle. Strong El Niño patterns often increase wind shear over parts of the Atlantic Basin, making it harder for tropical systems to organize and strengthen. That can quiet parts of the Atlantic season, but it is not a shield from the leftovers that sometimes ride north into Tennessee and bring heavy rain inland.

Every El Niño behaves a little differently. A strong event can make certain outcomes more likely, but it does not hand every county the same season. Local storms still depend on fronts, moisture, heat, timing, and where storms set up on a given day.

Watching it from home

That is where the new Lynchburg camera fits.

The global pattern can tell forecasters what kind of season may be setting up. The camera can show what is happening in Moore County right now.

For residents, it means the next storm, sunset, shelf cloud, downpour, or heat reading will no longer have to be guessed from elsewhere.

Summer is still summer. Heat will still build. Thunderstorms will still depend on the daily setup. But the background pattern has changed, and Moore County now has another way to watch it unfold.

El Niño is here. It is expected to strengthen. And from late summer into winter, Middle Tennessee will be watching the same things it always watches when the weather starts leaning one way or another: the pasture, the pond, the garden, the camera, and the sky.