Will it snow in Florida this holiday weekend? Temperatures forecast below freezing
.JPG "The only snow in Florida this holiday season was shipped in for holiday events, like this past one in Weston")
Forecasters feel Floridians could wake to freezing temperatures as low as 29 in Tallahassee and 30 in Gainesville Sunday morning.
Water freezes at 32 degrees. It snowed in Miami and other parts of the state on Jan. 19, 1977, when temperatures dipped below freezing for more than 10 hours, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. It was 10 degrees in Pensacola. Orlando dipped to 20. Fort Lauderdale shivered at 28 degrees. Even Miami Beach only reached 32 degrees that morning.
READ MORE: It snowed in Miami? We woke up to the impossible on this day, and here’s what we did
So will it snow anywhere in Florida this weekend?
“I could say, definitely, it’s not going to snow,” said meteorologist George Rizzuto of the National Weather Service in Miami. “Nowhere in the state is going to see snow with this.”
Why won’t it snow?
Said the forecaster: “To get snow you would need cold enough temperature throughout the whole atmosphere, like vertical, freezing temperatures throughout with some vertical continuation to them. But then we also need more moisture.”
The cold front forecast for Florida that could pull temperatures down to 45 degrees in Miami, matching Christmas Day, is going to be largely dry as it pushes through the peninsula, Rizzuto said.
If any rain was to fall, to support any snowfall it would have to be frozen throughout the entire column that it is falling through and that’s simply not going to happen, according to the weather service.
“Oh, maybe in very far northern portions of the area you can get something frozen very high aloft. By the time it falls it actually wouldn’t be frozen by the time it hits the ground,” Rizzuto said.
What about frost?
Parts of Florida will see frost on the ground. Think of it akin to morning dew.
“If the temperatures are cold enough and the wind speeds are low enough and you have enough moisture we get frost that forms on grass blades and certain plants. So that’s a possibility down here in South Florida, Saturday night into Sunday morning,” Rizzuto said.
But he’s thinking the likelihood is for interior portions and Southwest Florida for “a little bit of frost” early Sunday morning.
But frost is not in the forecast for the region.
“Patchy early morning frost” is forecast in Jacksonville between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Sunday when a 35-degree low is predicted, according to the weather service office in Jacksonville.
In Gainesville, “widespread frost” is forecast between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. Sunday and “areas of frost” could be lingering into those hours on the Monday Martin Luther King Day holiday.
What about sleet?
On Christmas, sleet was seen in parts of Brevard County. Sleet isn’t snow.
Sleet happens when snowflakes partially melt as they fall through a shallow layer of warm air and then refreeze as slushy “frozen rain drops” near the ground, according to the weather service. Sleet can gather on the ground and appear like snow but it’s not same thing.
Sleet is not in Florida’s forecast this long holiday weekend.
