ORLANDO, Fla. – Florida has seen a rapid return to form over the last few days since our biggest cold outbreak of the winter season so far.
We went from temperatures in the low 30s, which felt well below freezing to us, right back into the 70s with sunshine.
I’m sure a lot of us, including myself truthfully, are thankful we’ve made a full recovery from our last-second decision to play around in the winter season like the rest of the country. But does this mean we can hang up our coats, toss our winter accessories back in their old hiding spots, and gear up for the beach again? Let’s break it all down piece by piece.
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We all know our state sticks out like a sore thumb. Literally. You look at it on a map and it juts out into the Atlantic in the lower right hand corner of North America. We’re also surrounded by water so its difficult to get frigid temperatures to stick for more than a week or so pending the air mass that brought it down is strong enough to last that long to begin with.
Next we have our upper air pattern; things like the jet stream, troughs and ridges, weak low level cold pushes, things like that which all play a role in whether or not Florida will receive a bout of bonified winter.
Finally, there’s another piece of the meteorological puzzle called “teleconnections.” In layman’s terms, everything that dictates our weather is connected to some other big moving cog or wheel. When something in the Pacific goes bonkers, weather over both North America and Asia will respond. Once our weather responds, the same happens with our neighbors across the Atlantic, and so on.
We do have some long-range computer models that can help us get a rough estimate of what the general weather pattern could look like several weeks to a month or so down the road. Temperature anomalies do favor keeping us at average temps if not ABOVE average as we work our way through February and on. Winter is naturally running out of time once we hit a stage called “transition” season, where we begin to see spring-like influences affecting our big picture weather pattern.
Florida may receive another dose of relatively cooler air, dropping us into the 60s about seven to 10 days from now, but nothing near as immense as our arctic air plunge that smothered Central Florida for days on end.
Looking at our teleconnections, it seems our arctic oscillation and another named the Pacific North American Oscillation will remain fairly tame through the foreseeable future. As such, models are unlikely to plaster our charts with massive winter storm systems and freezing temperatures down here in our neck of the woods.
But does this ultimately mean winter is OVER for us? It very well could! Does this also equate to no more cooler air making its way across the Florida peninsula? Not necessarily. Our long range charts and teleconnection forecasts seem to indicate we won’t be seeing another BIG TIME blast of fresh, freezing air anytime soon.
However, there is always a pocket of cold or cooler air moving about the pattern. The atmosphere wants to maintain a state of equilibrium as best it can, but this is physically impossible due to numerous variables. That’s why we have “weather” in general. Whenever you feel wind, thunderstorms, rain, snow, freezing rain, any of the above, even hurricanes, it’s the atmosphere doing whatever it takes to return to normal.
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