ORLANDO, Fla. – Today, Florida is marked by a threat for severe weather, especially if you happen to be reading from one of our northern viewing counties.
[TIMING: Storms, gusty winds expected as strong cold front sweeps across Central Florida]
Damaging winds, the potential for small hail, and we can’t rule out a stray funnel cloud or two, especially closer to the coastlines on either side of the peninsula.
The arrival of this rather potent front is a signal for something greater than a rainy day for Central Florida. We’ve officially hit the point on the calendar called “transition season.” This is a fancy slogan we use in synoptic meteorology to describe the changing of large-scale weather patterns from a winter setup to a spring time configuration.
This is kind of big, so let’s get into all the details surrounding transition season.
First things first, we no longer likely have to worry about (or unfortunately look forward to) any more arctic blasts. We’ve started to see a retrograde in the polar front jet stream over the northern United States, which signals warmth is coming up from the tropics and the cold is beginning to retreat as Earth continues around the sun.
The changing in our jet stream is a part of transition season. You see, the jet stream is made up of fast-moving wind speeds toward the highest point of our atmosphere, but the driver of these winds happens to be temperature. The jet is considered a “thermal wind.” As such, thanks to the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface, the jet will shift throughout the year.
During the winter, it’s much further south because of the Earth’s tilt and angle, with which the sun hits the planet’s surface. It’s right along the border of greatest temperature difference; cold air to the north, warm air to its south.
As we wander toward spring, and inevitably summer later into June, the jet will shift north as we welcome warmer temperatures across the United States. The jet wants to stay in close proximity to the “gradient” between the warm air and the cold air.
Now, because of this new jet stream pattern, this changes completely where we see our storm systems travel. Instead of tracking cold plunges and freezing temperatures, we start tracking thunderstorms and severe weather.
The “tornado season” officially gets started once we head for spring, and warmth begins to blanket the south and east United States.
The current storm system impacting us today is a bonified symbol of the changing times. Sure, we’ll still get a little chilly here and there with each passing cold front. Fronts and cyclones never actually go away, they just change with the seasons as well.
But don’t be surprised if we begin discussing more “severe weather threats” and thunderstorms in your forecast as opposed to wind chill temperatures, and the movement of the polar vortex.
