“This winter has felt ‘chilly,’ even though the temperatures have not been extreme,” stated weather.com press reporter and main Florida local Jan Childs. “There’s just no sunlight to take ‘the chill’ off.”
Tampa, as an example, had just three days characterized as “clear skies” days in December and January consolidated, according to National Weather Service stats. These data think about a “clear sky” day as one with 30% cloud coverage or much less balanced throughout the day. Tampa averages 20 such days each December and January.
et al.: It’s not simply clouds. Most of Florida has been much wetter than usual this winter.
Through Feb. 6, Ft. Myers, Trick West, Melbourne, Sarasota, and Tallahassee have each had one of their 10 wettest winters-to-date, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
Melbourne’s 26 days with at the very least 0.01 inch of rain is 3rd the majority of any type of winter to date.
El Niño’s function: Late fail very early spring is generally Florida’s drier period, one additional benefit for senior citizens and vacationers running away from wintertime’s cold in northern states.
But stronger El Niños, such as what remains in place right now, often tend to throw a wet blanket on that. This periodic warming of a strip of water straddling the equator in the Pacific Sea affects weather condition patterns hundreds of miles away.
In this instance, El Niño increases the subtropical air stream in charge of steering storms along the southerly rate of the United States. What results is rounds of much heavier rainfall and electrical storms during a Florida wintertime, even severe electrical storms, mixed in with the dry days.
We simply saw an example of this a few days ago, as a sprawling storm system took its time inching through the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast, bringing saturating rainfall and also a few tornadoes to Florida.
Any kind of springtime alleviation: Even though it’s anticipated to eventually disappear, El Niño is still likely to continue influencing the nation’s weather condition pattern through spring.
Looking at past solid El Niño wintertimes and springs considering that in 1950, they were wet in Florida in March, then eased off a little bit into April and May.
It does not indicate that the situation will certainly happen once more this springtime.
Yet it offers Floridians, and those with springtime holiday strategies, a little support at the end of what’s been a bleak winter season.
Jonathan Erdman is an elderly meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering nationwide and worldwide weather since 1996. His long-lasting love of weather forecasting began with a close encounter with a tornado as a youngster in Wisconsin.
He studied physics at the College of Wisconsin-Madison and, after that completed his Master’s degree collaborating with dual-polarization radar and lightning data at Colorado State College. Severe and unusual weather conditions are his favored topics. Reach out to him on X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Facebook and Bluesky.