ORLANDO, Fla. – The past week has been absolutely plagued by abnormally warm and muggy temperatures across Central Florida.
Gone are the comfortable mornings and mild afternoons after fall was forcibly put into place when Milton rocked us with its landfall in mid-October.
But as we creep closer and closer to the Thanksgiving holiday and nearing the arrival of winter, many want to know why it’s been so hot lately.
We’re currently situated in a very summerlike type of upper level pattern. A staple setup this time of year would involve a trough extending from eastern Canada, down the United States coast, and into the Southeast.
However, this pattern is quite literally upside down right now.
If you look at the graphic below, you’ll notice we’re blanketed by dark shades of orange. I’ll bet you immediately associated those colors with HEAT. And you would be absolutely correct if you did.
The atmosphere behaves like the rubbers or plastics you’d find on your vehicle for example. When it’s cold out, plastics and rubber tend to shrink. This lowers the overall height of the atmosphere.
Have you ever started your car on a cold morning and notice your tire pressure alert going off? It’s the same concept. When it’s warmer, the atmosphere will expand, causing higher heights.
The red shading here depicts those higher heights overtop our area, which is the culprit for pumping all this warm and soupy tropical moisture into Florida.
Now, let’s fast forward to next Thursday. See how we have quite literally flipped the pattern? We now have darker shades of blue, purple, and pink even, extending their way out of Canada and down the eastern half of the United States. This tells us there is cooler air being funneled south into the trough present over the Great Lakes and into the Appalachians.
The dominant high pressure ridge once present over us is now over Northern Mexico. As a result, the desert southwest and the four corners states will start to experience a warming trend, while we start to cool back down.
At this point, it’s difficult to determine how much cooler it will be in Central Florida, but expect near-normal temperatures for this time of year at the very least.
But wait, there’s more!
This isn’t the only time Florida should see a comfortable drop in surface temperatures. It appears most of our long-range ensemble guidance (ensembles are FAR more reliable for tracking and forecasting into the far distant future, and we can dig into that for a later story) suggest a second shot of cooler air coming down from Canada with a bit more vigor behind it, just before we roll into the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
So if you’re not a fan of this pseudo return of summer, relief is on the way.
