OOOOOk Finnaly not busy, wow looks like someone already tryed to explain.
Alright Lets start in winter time shall we? In Jan, Feb and March, that is Floridas Tornado season, if you could set one. Florida doesnt really have a strong season like the plains and mid west. But March is our most active tornadic month. We get More tornados than any other state, per square mile, and we get the second most tornados per any state, period. Second to Texas. We may not get the F-4s and F-5s that the plains get but we get occasional F-3s. This is because, well the state is not wide enough to get as much heating as lets say, Salina, KS.
The state doesnt cause enough heat build up, to cause big hail or tornados. In this season though, we get most of our severe weather from strong cold fronts and spring storms, like the current ones rocking the mid west. This season is typically a cool, stable time of the year, so thats why we need the instability of a cold front to come thru to stir things up.
Ok now the storm chasers favorite time of year in florida April-August. We get almost everything this time of year. Hurricanes can cause hundreds of tornados on landfall because of the rolling of air. Picture a wall of air moving 100mph hitting land and slowing rapidly. Well, the air will trip up on its self and start rolling. The massive updraft from the hurricane starts sucking the air back up to replenish itself, but causes the rolling air to stand up and start spinning vertically. Since a hurricane has multiple feeder bands, and is usually 300-500 miles wide, about 60-120 tornadoes can spawn just on landfall, But they are hard to notice because of the massive straightline winds from the storm itself.
But when Hurricanes are not hitting, Florida is notorious for their afternoon daytime heated thunderstorms, which are almost always severe. I live in Palm Beach county, and Im just gonna tell you the way a usual summer afternoon will roll out. We usually start the day with cumulus clouds in the mid morning. You can tell by now how bad the day will be by one two factors. 1. How strong the east wind is. And, 2. How tall the clouds are before noon time. The bigger the worse the day will be, and the weaker the winds also mean worse weather conditions. Well at about 1pm the storms will start to stall out from the lack of seabreeze about 30 miles west of the beach, and about 20 miles east of Lake Okeechobee. Since the Gulf breezes usually dont reach the opposite coast, the storms sit out west, and just dump horrid amounts of rain, hail, and tornados on the farm land. If the gulf breezes and maybe a slight breeze from Lake O cause the storms to move back east, the weather could get VERY shakey. In August of 2003, a tornado back built over the ocean because the Gulf breezes were so strong the storm had a double updraft, and by about 5pm when the gulf winds got weak, the Atlantic seabreezes over rode the storms movement and caused a triple tornado outbreak. I didnt call this storm in but the tornado struck right across the street from my house.... while I was outside. Three F-2s. The end of te day can cause rain cooled nights, and beautiful sunsets from the stray anvils of the old dead thunderstorms.
In the Fall to winter, we get almost similar conditions as the winter and spring but severity of storms get weaker as the season go on. This is probably the weakest time of year, but a strong winter cold front can cause a bit of a surprise.
If you have anything you want to know, go ahead and ask, sorry for the massive post, hope you like it enough to give me positive feedback.
