ORLANDO, Fla. – Tis the season! Christmas is on the immediate horizon! Can you believe it? It feels like we were just talking about the entry of spring, the start of hurricane season and what came along with it.
Now we’ve already ROCKED through the first few holidays of the end of the year and are fast approaching one of the last.
Are you ready for a WHITE CHRISTMAS!?
Well, I hope not. Because we don’t get those in Florida. In fact, the type of pattern we’re sitting beneath as you’re reading this article is more or less what looks to take shape as we approach the last couple of days to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
You probably noticed it was pretty rainy yesterday, especially if you reside somewhere along the east coast of the Florida peninsula.
Quite windy too, with gusts approaching 15 to 20 mph directly out of the east. This is caused by a dominating area of high pressure offshore in the Atlantic, driving winds across our area. That same high pressure is also helping up our temperatures and available moisture for rainfall.
As we get into the weekend, our next cold front is likely to come down and clear us of all this extra humidity and rainfall. Then as expected, we’ll be faced with colder temperatures to start our Saturday and Sunday.
That is the KEY to your Christmas forecast.
Everything mother nature throws at us comes in waves, like you’d see at the beach. When one wave crashes ashore, the waters calm before slowly piling back out to build the next big wave that’s to come flowing inland. Right now we’re beneath high pressure. Sure, it’s causing us some rain with the help of a disturbance in our vicinity.
But high pressure you could think of as the “calm before the storm”. In this case, that next storm or next wave coming ashore will be the arrival of our next plunge of polar air from up North.
If the timing holds true, we’ll have our colder temperatures with us likely from Saturday through to the new week; Christmas week.
Now if you’re putting the puzzle pieces I laid out for you above together, you probably already know where this is going. After the front passes through, and our surface temperatures cool down, there’s the phase between big weather systems.
As a result, we’re beneath high pressure again which will slowly but surely undergo a process called “modification”.
Modification is essentially when you take cold air from up north, and put it in a warmer environment, it slowly but surely becomes more like its current environment. Take an ice cube out of your freezer and put it outside on a hot summer day and it will quickly melt. You’ve taken it out of its cold “source” and put it in a hot new environment. Kind of the same concept here!
For your Christmas holiday, we look to rebound into much milder temperatures. Lows to start both days in the low to mid 50’s, cresting into the low to mid 70s but the hottest part of the afternoon. For most Floridians, this sounds like EXCELLENT news!
As of now, for those of us wishing for a colder, wintry Christmas (myself included), maybe things will change, or perhaps that will stay on standby for Christmas 2025.
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