Florida Weather and Climate Data for October to December 2012

When you're a gardening nut like I am, there comes a time when you enjoy reading about the weather.

Yep, the weather. It's no longer just fodder for small talk...it becomes a serious preoccupation. One of your daily, anticipatory delights. And I say that seriously, without the tongue-in-cheek 'tude, heh.

Since it's a new month, I went on to the National Climatic Data Center website and I looked at what they had to say about 2012...and of course, of the last 3 months when it seemed Florida was way hotter than it used to be.

So, climate-wise, here's what was happening in the US last year:

Then I looked at the overall climate in 2012 and whaddayaknow, it was the hottest on record for the last 118 years! Since 1895 in fact, when the US started monitoring these things.

As you can see, according to the national averages for 2012, every single state was experiencing elevated temperatures. Not one state recorded a near normal or normal weather. The numbers, I think, are ranks or scoring in terms of coldest to warmest. I see that Florida was way above normal in terms of the usual temperatures that it gets. As opposed to what standard though, I wonder.

For the last three months, Central Florida was either experiencing close to its normal averages or, well, slightly warmer than usual. Stands to reason because we didn't have the usual amount of rains that would've cooled the atmosphere somewhat.

Drilling down, here are the temperature and rain map for each individual months of the last quarter of 2012. Looks like Florida was staying true to form in October in terms of temperature and rains...

Then it got cooler in November. I remember we had some high 60s and low 70s...

Until it started warming up slightly in December. We did have a chilly Christmas and New Year's, but not much. Tolerable, not the chilled-to-the-bone and worth-bringing-out-the-bubble-jackets-previously-kept-in-moth-balls kind of cold.

This January though, we've been having some extremes in weather changes - chilly one day, very warm the next, from high 60s to high 80s from day to day. That may be why the flu's been having a heyday throughout the Sunshine State. We'll see what the averages are once the reports are out.