ORLANDO, Fla. – Happy Friday, Central Florida! I wish we had some excellent news to pass along as we prepare to enter the FINAL weekend of 2024, but rather we have to dissect some new up and comings in the weather department.
If you’ve been following along with us this week, we’ve been discussing our next couple of frontal features expected to dig south into the Florida peninsula as we go through the back end of this weekend and next week. New Year’s Eve looks to be in the clear, but we’re starting the day Friday with some light rain and showers along our coasts and now examining the potential for stronger storms on Sunday.
Storm Prediction Center has highlighted Marion County for a marginal threat for severe, which means we could have a stray powerful storm or two form IF the conditions are right. This is called a CONDITIONAL severe risk. Let’s break that down together!
So, for severe weather you need moisture, heat and a trigger. In this case, we have all three. The moisture is being force-fed into Central Florida via the two jet streams to our north and west. Heat, the song and dance of the Sunshine State. The last few days have been warmer and muggier than we’ve realized for the last couple weeks. Lastly, the lift provided by our cold front will act as our trigger.
But this comes with conditions! That’s where the term conditional comes from. If one of these details goes sideways, or we lose the ability to really ignite the bad weather forecast by our computer models, then the whole set up falls to the wayside. Let’s say we have too much moisture, too much cloud cover, then the heating effect we look for for these storms to fire doesn’t quite come together.
If the front loses some of its steam before entering our viewing area, our trigger becomes much weaker and as a result the storms don’t pop off as fierce as currently projected. So, this is far from a slam-dunk forecast.
For Friday and Saturday, the humidity will linger as will some fog on the roadways early in the morning. Rain chances are currently at their highest today, especially closer to Brevard and Volusia counties. Then Saturday, we see a dwindling of the showers, before our main event ramps up around noon Sunday.
Temperatures won’t be dropping as much as we’ve seen recently. The next front seems to try to pull away from us before it has an opportunity to provide us with as big a chill as prior cold fronts have. However, later into next week, we’re tracking another front in the first couple days of 2025 that will up our rain chances and possibly drop temps back below average for some.
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