Pull out the long-sleeved T-shirts and top off your morning tea: The first cold front of the fall season is here.
Oddly, lows this weekend will dip down to near 70 degrees in the Fort Myers-Naples area, and lows will stay in that zone for a few days.
“We have this front over us and there will be slightly cooler and drier air coming in and lows will be down near 70 during the weekend and into early next week,” said Matt Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Ruskin. “Here in Florida, just a few degrees of change is noticeable.”
Anderson is right about that: We pay attention to weather in Southwest Florida.
Pristine weather is one of the top draws for this region, and the weather only gets seriously bad during large tropical storms and hurricanes.
Still, summer temperatures can almost feel crippling at times.
“There’s a little bit of reprieve from the humidity as well,” Anderson said. “Dew points, our measure of moisture, will be in the low-to-mid 70s, and we’re typically in the mid-to-upper 70s in the summer.”
Lows in Southwest Florida during most of the summer hover around 78 degrees to 80 degrees.
A drop of 7 or 8 degrees will give locals a nice break from the sweltering summer heat that’s so common in September.
Season’s first cold front is moving south, through Florida
“The front is stretching east to west over south Florida, and right now it’s across Lee County and stretching to the east,” Anderson said. “So it’s really a stalled boundary, but the forecast is for it to move further south.”
This system, Anderson said, is truly the first cold front of the season.
NWS does not keep records for the average day on which the first cold front arrives here, so that information is unavailable.
It will still be warm each day over the next week, but temperatures are starting to trickle downward.
Highs are still going to be in the 80s, he said, “and the temperatuers will start to creep up in the next week or so to the upper 80s.”
Will SW Florida see signficant rain from the season’s first cold front?
Southwest Florida has been in drought conditions for much of 2025, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
Anderson said the area is about 15 inches below average for rainfall for this time of year.
“We’re at about 30 inches (for the calendar year) and normal for this time of year is 45 inches,” he said. “Those are rounded numbers and that’s through the first of this month.”
And while most wintertime cold fronts bring at least a small amount of rain, the area will be dry for the next week or so.
“But we still have rain chances and they’re about 30%,” Anderson said. “And seasonally that’s a pretty low chance. Even next week the chances go down to 20%. So we’re looking at a drier pattern as we get into early next week.”
NOAA is calling for above-average rainfall and above-average temperatures in September, October and November.
El Nino is in a neutral phase and shouldn’t impact the tropics
While there’s little more than a month left in the rainy season, hurricane season runs through Nov. 30.
El Nino conditions can help keep the tropics quiet during the hurricane season, but La Nina can open up the atmopshere to more storm development.
Anderson said conditions are expected to be neutral through November.
“There are no predictions for El Nino or La Nina, and it’s favored to stay in neutral over the next three months,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: When will it ever cool off? This weekend, NWS says of season’s first cold front
Reporting by Chad Gillis, Fort Myers News-Press / Fort Myers News-Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
