Jim Weber's Blog

It's the last day of April and officially it will go down in the books as wetter than normal, but that is only thanks to all the rain on April 6th where we picked up 2.05" on that one day. Otherwise there was not much to speak of in April. We have also seen the last couple of fronts get weaker and weaker as they move into the state. This time of the year we are known as the graveyard of fronts. The last front that moved thru on Monday night brought lower humidity and only marginally cooler weather. One nice bonus is with the drier air it did allow for a cooler night last night.

Brooksville had a cool low of 44° last night! The front left nothing but clear skies across the entire area today. We had a high of 84° today here in Tampa but with dewpoints in the low 40s it felt more like a late March day. One of the really cool tools we get to use at FOX 13 is McIdas HD which we normally use to display GOES 12 imagery. One of the other things we use it for is to display true color images from the MODIS satellites known as Terra and Aqua. What a great view from the sattellite today! Not a single cloud over 80% of the state. With the mid day pass from the satellite and the sun over head it makes the coastline look like it is glowing with the sun glint. Check out these images!

And a close up of central Florida:

If you look close you will notice a little smoke drifting south from a fire in Okeechobee county. These images are 250 meter resolution images taken this afternoon from the Aqua MODIS satellite.

So now we are heading into May and it is also one of our drier months. Typically our rainy season starts up around the 2nd or 3rd week of June. So May is usually just dry and HOT!  Cold fronts have little to no effect on our weather because they either just don't make it here or by the time they get here they are so weak they are really nothing more than a shift in the wind and slightly drier air. We may mention a front and unless you watched the weather that day, you would have no idea today was any different than the day before. With that in mind it looks like this weekend will be one of those fronts. A cold front is heading our way for Sunday, but all the energy will go well to our north so maybe the northern part of our state will see a shower or two, but other than that just a shift in the wind. Here is a little animation from the GFS model showing our weekend front.