ORLANDO, Fla. – Despite such a hot and fairly clear Sunshine State weekend, severe weather has once again hit the forecast for your approaching Monday.
The Storm Prediction Center has highlighted the northern periphery of our viewing area for a marginal risk of a strong storm or two.
The dominating subtropical ridge over the southeast United States and extreme western Atlantic Ocean has driven up a tremendous amount of warm, moist air, which remains entrenched across our peninsula. As a result, even the SLIGHTEST dose of cool, dry air will act like nitro and set off a solid batch of showers and storms.
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Because of the approaching rather potent cold front, we’re expecting a return of rainfall for us come Monday and Tuesday. The Storm Prediction Center has highlighted the threat that some of these storms try to go severe as they come down across our area.
Our greatest risks during this event are fairly consistent with what we’ve observed during the last couple of bouts of springtime bad weather. Heavy periods of rainfall in localized spots could pile up quickly, as well as frequent lightning with some of your more organized thunderstorms.
We have a good pocket of drier air well above us in the middle portions of our atmosphere, which will help some of our stronger clusters of rain produce gusty winds as they come down on top of you.
Then of course, we can’t rule out the potential for some small hail and an isolated funnel cloud or tornado because we will have a lot of movement throughout the air if you were to look at our atmosphere three-dimensionally.
One critical component that could throw a wrench in some of these storms trying to do more than produce rain is the timing of our cold front’s arrival. Models are expecting the front to try and slip south through Central Florida overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.
As a result, we lose the one piece that could stir the pot even more so than the front itself — the sun! Daytime heating is responsible for allowing our environment to become unstable, like the nitroglycerin analogy I used above. When we lose the sun and progress into the overnight hours, the Earth’s surface naturally becomes a lot more stable and we don’t get as much rising air as when the ground is ridiculously hot during the day.
Our greatest chance for thunderstorms appears to be late in the day — if not evening time — Monday. Then we can see an extension of the rainfall into the first half of Tuesday.
The European and GFS computer models actually hint at the front stalling a bit as it moves south of Osceola and Brevard counties. If it slows down, that could keep some lingering showers in the forecast for some before we clear out and welcome a pleasant change in our temperatures. A return to highs in the 70s and low 80s the few days following this cold front will be MUCH APPRECIATED.
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