ORLANDO, Fla. – If you’ve set foot outside recently, whether it be to throw out the trash, pick up an order at your front door, go put the garbage bins out front, or hop in the car to hit the road for school or work, you were likely BLASTED by this heat absolutely dominating our area.
Over the last 4-5 days, a very anomalous weather pattern has established itself off our west coast. To make matters worse, it’s stuck there!
During its time spent hanging out over the open waters of the Gulf, it’s increased our daytime temperatures dramatically. Air temperatures have been consistently reaching towards the mid 90s since about Wednesday or Thursday earlier this week.
It looks like our temps will continue climbing over the next few days as well, likely peaking sometime around Tuesday or Wednesday coming up.
If you’ve had the opportunity to read a few of my previous articles here on Click-Orlando, I’ve mentioned a weather term you may or may not be familiar with – teleconnections.
Teleconnections are much bigger than the weather pattern we typically examine for us here in Central Florida. Some could say it’s larger than the entirety of the United States.
As the name implies, a teleconnection is an enormous coupling of different connective pieces in the atmosphere that help us meteorologists determine when a weather pattern could develop or disappear in our general region.
Right now, we’re back smack-dab under a negative Pacific North American oscillation. This means, powerful and dominant ridge in place for us over the south and east United States, and cooler troughing extending down south across the Rockies to our west.
As long as this oscillation remains in place, our summertime temps aren’t going anywhere and we won’t see any substantial rain.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, it does appear our long-range computer models are in unanimous agreement we should see a full pattern flip just before we end of the month of May.
We’re pinpointing May 24 for this transition to begin taking place, and before we round out the month, we should see temperatures finally return to form – at least before we get any closer to the official calendar start of the summer.
With this change in the overall weather “configuration” over North America, this should also welcome in greater chances of rain and storms. We’ll need an abundance of this if we are to alleviate the drought conditions likely creeping back up as you read this article, even after the dousing of rain we received the weekend prior.