Florida should enter the darkest days of the year swollen with rain, satiated by daily sea breeze-lifted thunderstorms, with lakes and reservoirs and the river of grass full and aching for a winter dry down.
But a parched summer led to a drought-stricken fall for much of the state, with about 63% of Florida in drought as of Nov. 26. Areas of the Panhandle were painted kidney red with exceptional drought — the highest level on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale and the first time that severity of Earth thirst has appeared in Florida since 2012.
Tampa had its driest autumn in at least 136 years. Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Gainesville all ranked in the top 10 for their driest September to October periods, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
And now, meteorological winter has begun marked by La Niña. The periodic climate pattern has a tendency to flatten the roaring jet stream current, trapping cool air to its north and meaning more warm, dry days ahead for the Sunshine State. Typical La Niña winters can mean average temperatures of 1 to 3 degrees above normal.
“I’ve tried not to be Chicken Little, but I’ve been persistently worried about this season,” said Tommy Strowd, the Lake Worth Drainage District’s executive director, about going into Florida’s dry season in drought. “The answer always is that it will probably rain and everything will be fine, but if it’s not, we could have an issue later this season and we are looking at contingencies.”
The Panhandle is expected to get a soaker the weekend of Dec. 6 with a cold front bringing as much as 6 inches of rain, but it’s unlikely to completely undo the drought entirely.
Florida’s 2025 winter forecast is for dryer warmer weather
The National Weather Service in Miami and the South Florida Water Management District presented their dry season forecast on Dec. 3. Officials from both agencies noted the lack of water and the possibility that water managers may need to be frugal this winter with how it is doled out.
“Our confidence is pretty high we will see drought conditions spread or even worsen,” said Robert Molleda, the meteorologist in charge at the NWS office in Miami. “The wildfire threat could increase in January and the second half of the dry season.”
In South Florida, the dry season officially lasts Oct. 15 through May 15.
Strowd was reluctantly rooting for a sloppy tropical system to swipe at Florida during hurricane season, a storm with just enough moisture to plump Lake Okeechobee so it could readily water farms to its south and the City of West Palm Beach to its east if needed. West Palm relies on the lake as a backup water supply.
But tropical cyclones bypassed the state, and the second mode of summer rainfall largess — afternoon thunderstorms — also faltered as high pressure bullied East Coast sea breezes so deep inland that rain was pinned in the center of the state or closer to the west coast.
On Dec. 2, Lake Okeechobee was about a foot below normal, Strowd said.
West Palm Beach was down 14 inches of rain for the year as of Nov. 30. Fort Myers was down nearly 18 inches. And Tallahassee had a deficit of more than 12 inches.
“If we don’t have a ton of help with rain coming from front after front, we could see the drought grow and worsen as the winter progresses,” said Robert Garcia, warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS office in Miami. “It’s not just the water at the surface, it’s the aquifer, and a lot of places are lower than what we’d like to see after a wet season.”
This winter’s La Niña is forecast to be weak and last through February
La Niña, which was declared by the Climate Prediction Center in October, happens when Pacific waters cool, moving tropical thunderstorms so that the wind shear in the Atlantic wanes during hurricane season. The lower wind shear gives budding tropical cyclones more encouragement to form.
In winter, La Niña forms an area of high pressure in the Pacific that pulses winter storms into the northwestern United States. The more northerly track of storms holds the jet stream at higher latitudes longer, where it traps cold and stormy air to its north.
During El Niño, warm water that has been pushed by trade winds into the western reaches of the Pacific Ocean rushes back east. That movement shifts where the deep tropical thunderstorms form and creates wind shear that chops up Atlantic tropical cyclones. In winter, El Niño nudges the jet stream south, giving Florida cooler, wetter, stormier winters.
El Niño and La Niña are part of the powerful El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.
But neither is a slam dunk in terms of controlling the weather.
“The planet on any given year may not behave it the way you expect,” said Isla Simpson, a scientist at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research. “On any given year, anything can happen.”
Other patterns, such as the jet stream-meddling North Atlantic Oscillation and the globetrotting Madden Julien Oscillation, can override La Niña and El Niño.
And Simpson said this winter’s La Niña is expected to remain weak, meaning it’s more susceptible to atmospheric persuasion.
2025 hurricane season had no U.S landfalls
Some people speculated in the spring that the brewing La Niña would backload the hurricane season. It didn’t.
Instead, notably, there were no U.S. hurricane landfalls — a breather for twitchy Floridians who experienced 10 land clashes with hurricanes since Hermine broke a previous tropical truce in 2016.
The season was also tossed by three Category 5 storms. That was more than any season except 2005, which had four Cat 5 hurricanes.
Hurricane Melissa tied 2019’s Dorian and the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 for the strongest landfalling Atlantic basin storm on record, hitting Jamaica with sustained 185 mph winds.
Hurricanes Humberto and Imelda did a do-si-do in the western Atlantic, coming within 460 miles of each other, which is the closest distance measured between storms since reliable satellite images were introduced in the 1960s.
An unusual 20-day dry spell hit just as the season peaked.
And despite just 13 named storms — one fewer than average — the virility and duration of the systems had an accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE, of 133, when the average is 123.
“Much like last year, it was a very strange season with little to no activity in the usual peak part of the season,” said University of Miami Rosenstiel School researcher Brian McNoldy in his Tropical Atlantic Update blog. “Not every year follows climatology.”
Kimberly Miller is a journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate, weather, and the environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. Help support our local journalism, subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida’s severe drought doesn’t need this. What La Niña winter means
Reporting by Kimberly Miller, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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