Tampa was much hotter and wetter than normal last month.
You may have heard that it was so hot in Mexico in May that howler monkeys were dying and falling out of the trees.
Well, that same area of historic high pressure over Central America also extended into Florida and drove up the heat into June, making it the fourth hottest June in the city since 1890.
Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with the nonprofit Climate Central, said Tampa also saw the second warmest average nighttime temperature on record.
"That nighttime warmth is significant because we see nighttime temperatures warming almost twice as fast as the daytime," Winkley said.
And that heat was met with spring weather conditions, which triggered intense thunderstorms and severe weather.
Winkley said climate change also brings warmer air that holds more moisture.
"So, rainfall and precipitation trends are getting not only heavier, meaning higher risk of flooding and higher risk of one area getting a lot of rain, but it's also not proportional anymore," Winkley said.
Winkley said parts of Florida got a lot of rain, while others didn't see quite as much as they usually do during the spring, and that's a nationwide trend.
Urban heat islands
Parts of Tampa are 9 degrees hotter than the city's overall forecast on any given day, according to a new analysis from Climate Central.
Researchers looked at how heat in urban areas fluctuates from block to block. It did this by using the census to divide areas into groups of around 3,000 people.
Climate change is raising the baseline temperature, but urban heat islands are additional heat on top of whatever the regular temperature is. And they’re hotter due to population density and development.
“Particularly if people also live there, because we generate a lot of heat, as well. We generate heat with our cars, we generate heat with our buildings,” said Jen Brady, who led this analysis.
Other cities in Florida with hotspots include Miami, West Palm Beach and Jacksonville.
"Some of the other cities in Florida, you see more distributed heats. Around Orlando there's more distributed pockets of extreme heat because of just how the city is laid out. But really the coastal cities, you see more dense heat,” Brady said.
Climate Central also worked closely with folks at Columbia University’s Brown Institute to look at neighborhoods that were historically redlined, which is a discriminatory practice in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities.
“And they found that across the country … neighborhoods that were historically redlined are hotter neighborhoods, and that was a pattern they found quite universally,” Brady said.
Heat islands are also contributing to the warmer nights, she said, because heat absorbs into the materials of our infrastructure and gets released at night.
“Warm nights are something that people are growing are increasingly concerned about because bodies recover at night. That's when we see a lot of the health impacts,” Brady said.
Brady said she hopes this analysis and accompanying map are going to help neighborhoods, cities and states recognize that there are pockets which are much hotter and much higher risk when we have extreme heat.
“A lot of cities are thinking about planting trees, putting in parks. Doing these kinds of cooling things, putting in a cooling center. Maybe a map like this will help them identify where the risk is, and where they should target those activities,” Brady said.
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