ORLANDO, Fla. – Our good friend the groundhog predicted an extra six weeks of winter.
I want to let you know, it might be a struggle to get Florida to play along.
Our recent expansive pattern shift across North America is a sign we’re hitting a point between winter and spring, called “transition season.”
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This is when our atmosphere begins to feel the change in our orbit around the sun and our natural tilt in the axis of our planet starts to warm up different parts of the globe.
For those who may not know, that’s what creates our seasons. Quite literally, just where we are in space and where the sun hits the Earth the greatest. Then, the weather simply responds to this difference in heating.
When we start to see warm features absolutely dominate the southern United States, that’s a telltale sign of the changing times.
Usually right about now is when that begins to happen. Pending what’s going on in localized corners of the world, this is when the jet stream starts to shrink back and retreat northward into Canada and closer to the poles.
We’re starting to see more and more instances of warmer, subtropical air battling back against the wintry tundra that kicked off the month of February.
Our computer models suggest we’ll be in above-average temperatures through the rest of this month. There were subtle hints of more cooler air coming down to meet us in Florida end of the month, but that has since retrograded towards a warmer solution.
This is not to say the rest of the country won’t see snowfall here and there, and freezing temperatures come down. That’s the nature of the beast. Where there’s uneven heating on Earth’s surface (which is everywhere), you’ll see bouts of cold air pushing against the warmth.
The individual teleconnections we monitor to forecast when we’ll see cold or warm spells all point toward warm for us Floridians.
The arctic oscillation is a huge driving factor for what the Polar Vortex could be doing over the next couple of weeks. The data shows we’ll be looking at disruptions of the vortex, but nothing breaking it down altogether like when Florida froze over Feb. 1.
A few others, like the Pacific North American oscillation which I lean on a lot during the hurricane season, keep us in the negative phase. Your key takeaway there is negative means warm, positive usually means cold.
For the time being, as I continue to monitor trends, it appears the winter may reload for a final push come early March.
February, however, will feel very “Florida,” with daytime and nighttime temperatures ebbing and flowing between average for the time of year and above average with high pressure ridging overhead.