Saturday’s freeze warning expired. Thirty Georgia counties still face Sunday’s.

For residents with tender plants or exposed outdoor water lines, the practical deadline is before bed Saturday, not after waking Sunday. The forecast freeze could kill crops and other sensitive vegetation and damage unprotected outdoor plumbing. Waiting until morning could mean leaving them exposed through hours of the warning period.⁠1

The warning reaches from mountain communities such as Blue Ridge, Blairsville and Hiawassee through northwest Georgia and parts of metropolitan Atlanta, then south to communities including West Point and Pine Mountain. Cobb, Cherokee and Forsyth are among the covered counties near the metro area; Marietta, Woodstock and Cumming are among the communities named in the bulletin. It is not a statewide warning.⁠23

The full county list is Dade, Walker, Catoosa, Whitfield, Murray, Fannin, Gilmer, Union, Towns, Chattooga, Gordon, Pickens, Dawson, Lumpkin, White, Floyd, Bartow, Cherokee, Forsyth, Polk, Paulding, Cobb, Haralson, Carroll, Douglas, Heard, Coweta, Troup, Meriwether and Harris.⁠1

The 24°F figure describes how low temperatures could fall within that area, not a uniform temperature expected at every home, garden or farm. Individual communities will have different lows. The warning identifies a risk across the covered area; it does not establish that every exposed pipe will freeze or every crop will be lost.⁠23⁠7

A separate hazardous-weather outlook issued at 10:20 a.m. EST Saturday uses broader wording, describing a Sunday-morning freeze warning across “all of north and central Georgia.” The detailed freeze-warning bulletin, issued at 9:21 a.m., specifically names the 30 counties above. The broader outlook alone does not establish a county-by-county expansion of this particular warning.⁠23

The weather service’s instructions are direct: protect tender plants from the cold. For water pipes at risk of freezing, it gives three alternatives—wrap them, drain them or allow them to drip slowly. Those are alternative protective measures, not an instruction to drain a line and leave that same line dripping. The bulletin does not promise that any single measure will prevent all damage.⁠23

The reason to act Saturday evening is the timing. The warning begins at 1 a.m., well before many residents will be awake. Its scheduled 9 a.m. end is not the preparation deadline; by then, vulnerable plants and plumbing could already have spent much of the night in freezing conditions.

This is primarily a growing-season protection warning. The local weather service distinguishes frost-and-freeze alerts, intended to help gardeners and growers protect vulnerable vegetation, from separate cold-weather products addressing health risks such as hypothermia and frostbite. That distinction explains the warning’s emphasis on crops and plants; the event bulletin also explicitly identifies outdoor plumbing as vulnerable.⁠10⁠23

The warning sequence began with a November 13 alert forecasting two freeze periods: 1–9 a.m. EST Saturday, November 14, with temperatures as low as 29°F, followed by the same hours Sunday with temperatures as low as 24°F. A bulletin issued at 2:44 a.m. Saturday still carried both warnings, as reproduced by the Cobb County Courier. Those numbers were forecast minimums, not measured temperatures.⁠2⁠7

By the weather service’s 9:21 a.m. Saturday update, the first period had ended. The bulletin said “FREEZE WARNING HAS EXPIRED,” then immediately specified: “FREEZE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 1 AM TO 9 AM EST SUNDAY.” Read together, the lines close out Saturday’s warning while keeping Sunday’s in place.⁠23

There is another potential source of confusion: the November 13 alert record carried an expiration timestamp of 9:15 a.m. EST Saturday, before the Sunday freeze it also described. That earlier timestamp is not evidence that Sunday’s warning was canceled. The later bulletin expressly continues it. The available evidence does not establish the technical explanation for the earlier record’s expiration field, but it does resolve the practical question of whether the Sunday warning remains active.⁠2⁠23

Locally, a freeze warning calls for high confidence—greater than an 80 percent chance—that minimum temperatures will reach 32°F or below during the growing season, and can be issued up to 24 hours ahead. The frost-and-freeze program normally continues until November 20 or until a county experiences a widespread hard freeze: 28°F or below for several hours. A forecast minimum of 24°F does not, by itself, establish that every warned county will meet that coverage-and-duration threshold.⁠10

What remains unverified is how cold Saturday actually became and whether any damage occurred. Sunday’s observed temperatures and any resulting plant or plumbing damage will show what this next freeze delivered. For now, the supported course is straightforward: prepare before the overnight window, which is scheduled to end at 9 a.m. EST Sunday.⁠23