ORLANDO, Fla. – Over the weekend the first of a few cold fronts dipped south across the Florida peninsula. The most recent brought excessive rain delays to the Daytona 500, which was a concern of ours here in the Pinpoint Weather Center for several days leading up to the big event.
Tuesday morning, and especially Monday, temperatures to start your day were MUCH more pleasant than they’ve been for a majority of February. Is this winter’s return? Was the groundhog right?
Not so fast!
While we are now below average in terms of temperatures, it is not unreasonable to expect weak cold fronts to continue to drift through the southeast U.S. on their way into the western Atlantic.
By Wednesday, an even stronger front will whip through, dumping temperatures for the weekend ahead. But the cool weather ain’t sticking!
There are a few moving pieces we’ve been monitoring which has resulted in this flip-flop of our winter pattern.
The first being the breakdown of our polar vortex. When the vortex “breaks down” or “splits” which are commonly used terms you’ll hear when discussing this phenomena, it essentially means we’re no longer looking at a bundled up, concise bubble of the coldest polar/arctic air.
Right now if you look at a chart, we have a large fragment of the vortex drifting southward through Canada helping to funnel lots of fresh, cold air into the U.S. From there, we also have to look at our jet stream.
The jet stream is one of the primary contributors to the weather we receive on a day-to-day, week-to-week, even month-to-month or seasonal scale. It is controlled by temperatures in the atmosphere. So even though we’re talking winds, those winds are created by the unequal heating of Earth’s surface. Cold does not mix with warm, the same way water does not mix with oil.
The jet helps produce our low pressure areas, which create the winter storms we track on our graphics you see on digital or on your TV. Each of these spinning clusters of energy helps tug down more cold air from up north while driving warm air from the south into an area it doesn’t belong. That is called “temperature discontinuity.”
So each of these individual spins that move through the pattern displace different air masses. The jet has to respond by either dipping south or retrograding back toward the north.
We also have teleconnections, which we’ve discussed on a few occasions in previous articles I’ve written!
They give us the weather pattern at a much broader and grander scale. Sometimes these charts and couplings in the atmosphere can tell us what’s occurring between here in Florida all the way up to the poles and as far east or west as Asia and Africa. Teleconnections play a big role in winter forecasting, spring forecasting, the hurricane season, you name it.
Right now, our teleconnections indicate this is one last major push of cold air before we start to see more of a spring time pattern on our hands.
Floridians should be ready for about average temperatures as we wander through the rest of what was a record warm February!
That might also be why it seems like winter has suddenly blasted you when you set foot outside Monday morning or as you’re reading this piece. Typically, we receive our last solid dose of cool weather at about this point in March, which means we could very well be in the home stretch of winter. Pending Mother Nature doesn’t decide to pull something outlandish on all of us.
Naturally, Florida won’t bounce from 50s and 60s straight into the 90s. But for the bonified winter season, the clock is ticking.
