ORLANDO, Fla. – As promised, winter has made its return in our neighborhood since this past Sunday. Our latest cold front slid through late this past weekend, welcoming the arrival of lower, polar temperatures.
We started Tuesday in the very same cold air mass. I hope you’ve been taking advantage of wearing some of your favorite winter weather attire, especially given Florida doesn’t exactly allot us many opportunities to do so.
I, for one, actually appreciate a chance to accessorize a little around what Mother Nature throws at us! Have to make the best of an interesting situation, right?
But this isn’t an article about what to wear or how to arrange your closet for Florida’s back-and-forth daily weather swings.
I want to spend just a brief bit of time unpacking why Florida is so “bipolar” as many of us describe! A lot of it has to do with our position on the map, and the water that surrounds us on all sides.
Florida’s winter, thankfully, isn’t broken. It’s actually acting exactly as it should based on the very fundamental thermodynamic principles that drive all the weather we see and experience across the planet.
Heat, moisture, lift and back again.
First things first, I spent a lot of time in another HOT climate here in the United States, while serving as an active duty Air Force weather forecaster.
Tucson, Arizona, which resides in the lowest portions of Arizona outside of maybe Sierra Vista or Fort Huachuca, if you’re familiar with the desert southwest.
But get this - Arizona sees far more cold spells and snow than Florida ever could.
That’s because Arizona is actually much further north on the latitude scale than we are in the Sunshine State. Hence the nickname we’ve earned since the state came to be.
Florida lies on a latitude of roughly 24 degrees North to 31 degrees North. Arizona is easily another 5-7 degrees higher than this when you look at the globe.
On a flat map you see on TV when your favorite meteorologist is covering national weather, or on your phone when you pop up Car Play to plug in your destination, looks can be deceiving.
Florida has the southernmost latitude of all the contiguous United States, which means we’re closest to the tropics and closest to the equator, which receives the greatest amount of sunlight on a regular basis.
Even during winter, we get a lot more vitamin D in the form of sun rays than the majority of the Lower 48
Now, for my native Floridians, I’m sure this kind of feels like common knowledge if you’ve lived here during a summer season. Our sea breeze is a classic example of what occurs because of its influence.
Florida is indeed a peninsula, so we’re surrounded by deep bodies of water on all sides minus our northern escape into the panhandle, Georgia and Alabama.
In recent years, just about every year for an extended period of time now, the waters off both our shores have been warmer than history says they should be. Water is an excellent insulator of heat, with high “thermal inertia” as its called. Basically, it holds heat much longer than land, and loses/gains heat much slower than land.
This really messes with our local weather, like our summertime thunderstorms swooping in from coast to coast when the afternoon temps get hot enough.
In the winter team, it flushes cold air masses out of here in the blink of an eye through a process called modification. You ever come in after a hot day, and your clothes and your body naturally feel far warmer than the air inside your house or office? But after maybe 10-20 minutes of sitting still, your body matches the temperature of your new environment more or less?
That’s modification at its finest!
Another two details to point out are where our jet stream is usually positioned over the United States, and how quickly Florida continues to industrialize and build more and more.
All this construction you see, whether it be downtown, in your neighborhood, on the roads, the outbreak we’ve seen unfold here in Florida also plays with our weather. The more tarmac or asphalt around town, the more heat gets trapped down low. The greater the amount of buildings, even if they just be one or two story homes down a roadway, also retains heat and insulates the lowest levels of the atmosphere.
Then it becomes an even greater struggle to dispel this heat once the sun goes down. Add clouds and our natural high humidity values to the concoction and that heat isn’t going anywhere.
Finally, as we close out, the jet stream this time of year really does dictate all. We don’t have enough of the suns heat (typically as we’ve learned) to produce garden variety localized weather activity like showers and storms. We need the jet to help us out.
North of the jet stream is where our coldest air is found, and on the south side is the warmest. The jet is driven by the difference in temperature on either side. It’s like pulling teeth to get the jet to sag as far south as our area.
When it does, it very quickly rebounds back north like a rubber band or a resistance band at the gym. Taking the cooler air with it.