ORLANDO, Fla. – We’re halfway through June now (which is astonishing in of itself), and Central Florida remains beneath a ridge of high pressure.
This stubborn pressure system has been sitting overtop our area, and almost the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean to our east coast for nearly a month now. Have you ever seen the classic sci-fi film “The Blob”?
That’s kind of what we’re looking at here, only in the atmosphere.
Because of this, we’ll continue to see some daytime thunderstorms in the form of our sea breeze. But, it won’t be incredibly widespread coverage, nor will it douse everyone with some much-needed rain.
On top of that, our temperatures are going to stay in the 90s, with feels-like temps reaching upwards of 100-plus on several occasions.
High pressure this time of year naturally promotes HEAT!
Despite what the name typically implies, it’s a common misconception that high pressure solely means cooler temperatures. They are mostly found behind cold fronts, and usually show a change in our “air mass”.
In this case, though, not only are we beneath generally sinking air, which heats as it comes down in altitude, we’re also in the quadrant of the clockwise spin that draws warmer air from the Caribbean and the incredibly warm Gulf to our west.
Check out this colorful graphic.
If you notice where our high pressure is currently positioned, the winds flowing around the southern and southwestern flanks are right over the tropics. Because the atmosphere behaves like a liquid, this helps pull in that warm, tropical air and sweep it right over our state.
Next time you make a cup of coffee and pour in your creamer, watch what happens when you stir it. You’ll see that before it fully blends into your drink, it flows around the surface of the black coffee. That’s the same concept here. The high pressure acts like your spoon or your stirrer of choice, pulling the maritime tropical air from the south northward, till it blends with our air.
Finally, this ridge is really helping keep things like a desert across the tropics. We have good doses of moisture floating around the pattern, but nothing tropical has managed to form up quite yet because of how strong our winds are across the water surface.
Always remember — it’s a GIVE and TAKE with meteorology — or with Mother Nature. With every benefit on one end of the spectrum, there’s a lovely caveat on the other end.
Water temperatures have climbed dramatically over the western Caribbean Sea and especially the Gulf as a whole.
When you compare just a 30-day window, the Gulf’s full body of water has warmed from 27 degrees Celsius to 29.5 degrees Celsius.
In Fahrenheit, that’s a whopping 5-6 degrees.
I understand 5 to 6 degrees doesn’t sound like a ton at first glance. But think about it; the Gulf is about 600,000 square miles in surface area.
Alongside this size, it holds around 643 QUADRILLION (that’s a real unit of measure) gallons of water.
It takes a nasty virus or bug in our bodies to warm our internal temperature up about 1-3 degrees when we begin to show signs of a fever.
To see an increase in surface temperature of that magnitude in a month is an impressive feat that shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Not only will these heated waters influence our summertime weather conditions here in Central Florida, but we have to remember we’re in hurricane season now. Things are exceptionally quiet as a result of this extended high pressure. But the give and take here is, how long will it remain quiet? What happens when our first couple of tropical systems find their way into those waters?
Time will tell!