ORLANDO, Fla. – The Gulf of Mexico has been a hot topic in recent days. This quite literally includes the temperature of the water itself.
Compared to the climatological norm, the Gulf is HOT!
You could almost say it’s boiling given how above average the surface temperatures are running. So hot, if it were the correct time of year, tropical cyclone development would be FAVORED!
Now the whole Gulf is not a whopping 80 degrees, but something called the “loop current” is drawing warmer waters from the Caribbean Sea into its central and northern regions. As such, the anomaly chart lights up like the Fourth of July.
This has direct implications for our weather, even here locally. We’ve already felt examples of these abnormally hot waters impacting what we experience on a day-to-day here in Central Florida, especially before and after a cold front arrives.
What occurs in the ocean directly influences the weather we observe on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year scale. This is why tracking oscillations like El Niño and La Niña to name a few of the widely known teleconnections, is so important!
Our friends who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, are all bracing for some prolific severe weather the next few days.
The primary culprit? Mixing very hot water with colder temps plunging out of Canada and across the eastern United States! This is why we have regions like Tornado Alley and Dixie Alley. The gulf is a direct feed of warm, moist, unstable air to get those tornado-producing storms going.
With waters above what they typically run during this time of year, you best believe the same types of supercell storms could get even stronger thanks to the energy source they’re tapping into down south.
We can only hope several more cold fronts come down as a result of Punxsutawney Phil’s forecast... otherwise, we’ll be talking a totally different ballgame once we fast-forward to the month of June.
