As I sit and type this on Monday morning, my thermometer says that it is 28 degrees outside, making this our first freeze of the year. To tell the truth, I was beginning to think that Florida had decided not to participate in winter this year. In a typical year, we have usually had our first freeze some time in December.
A Central Florida winter isn’t like winters anywhere else. In winter here, we will get a frost or a freeze, but the temperature usually only stays below freezing until the sun comes up. The temperatures during the day will get to the 50’s or so, then will drop back down as soon as the sun sets. This will last for two or three days, then we are right back to daytime highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s. This cycle will repeat three or four times from mid December to about mid February, then the spring thunderstorm season begins.
Not this year. We have been in the 80s during the day, and the mid sixties at night. No frost, no cold. No cold weather until last week, when it dropped to 34 degrees on Monday morning, and our first below freezing this morning.
I remember when I was a kid, we once had a solid three days that temperatures stayed below freezing. My brother and I were amazed that a bucket of water left outside froze. We had never seen ice that wasn’t in the freezer before. I only saw snow twice before I joined the Navy: once in New Orleans when I was three, and once when we went to visit our cousins in Tennessee.
It isn’t climate change. It’s just weather. Four years ago, we had a snow storm around lunchtime, and even though the snow didn’t accumulate, the kids loved it. Next winter won’t be as warm.
4 Comments
Steve S · January 24, 2022 at 10:16 am
“Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get.” – Robert A Heinlein
SiG · January 24, 2022 at 10:26 am
Over here on the east coast, we only got down to 35 or 36. Enough to get some light, patchy frost.
But, like you, I was thinking we were going to get no winter at all.
Back in the ’80s, we had citrus trees. All of them were killed by hard freezes before about ’87.
In something like ’83 or ’84 I put a bucket outside to freeze. Growing up in Miami, the concept that water can freeze outside of a man-made appliance was something I knew on an academic level but had never experienced.
WDS · January 24, 2022 at 11:26 am
It’s supposed to hit 52 in South Cackylacky today so I’m figuring you’ll be about 10 degrees warmer you lucky dog.
Beans · January 25, 2022 at 3:25 am
First time I saw snow was on Christmas Day, 1973, in Satellite Beach (that’s just south of Cape Canaveral.) 1976is was the winters that killed off the orange groves from north of Orlando to the Georgia border. 1989 was the 3 days of frozen I-75 from Ocala to the Georgia border, so cold that I made a snowman (about 5″ tall) and trimmed the bushes using a 2×4.
It’s Florida.
What peeves me off is as soon as it gets below 70 degrees, the numbnuts all turn the heater on to 85 or so. Which is why the way to dress for Florida is to stay dressed in summer clothes and add layers. Because though it may be comfortable outside to us people of northern European stock, some twit will have, yes, jacked up the thermostat to bread-rising temperatures which also means the inside has less humidity than a hot day in Death Valley.
But it beats driving in snow and on salted roads, yes it does.
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