Tampa Bay has been record-breaking hot this year. What that means for summer. (2024)

The Tampa Bay area is experiencing temperatures that defy norms this time of year — in the air, on land and at sea.

May, usually a final reprieve before swampy summer weather smacks locals with a wall of humidity, was record-breaking hot and unusually dry.

Air temperatures leapt 3 to 5 degrees above average. Rainfall levels were only a third of what forecasters would normally expect. And the Gulf water temperatures around Tampa Bay surged above 90 degrees weeks ahead of schedule.

In the summer months ahead, researchers expect temperatures to lean above normal. The hot conditions, outside and in the water, also can bolster tropical storm activity and lead to days of dangerous heat.

Here’s an overview of the conditions that will influence our weather this summer.

May heat set records

Last month was the hottest May on record for many Tampa Bay cities, including St. Petersburg and Tampa.

Data from the National Weather Service shows St. Petersburg ran about 4.5 degrees above normal. Tampa temperatures were 3.5 degrees above normal.

Austen Flannery, a meteorologist for the weather service’s Tampa Bay office, said that while daytime temperatures were hot, nighttime temperatures likely boosted the average.

”Temperatures don’t cool down as much, and if it doesn’t cool down as much, then it’s going to contribute to an overall temperature that looks warmer,” Flannery said.

Temperatures at the start of May began close to normal, but a surge of warm air and water contributed to the ballooning heat, Flannery said.

The lack of rain was also a factor in the higher-than-average temperatures.

Flannery said storms act as a natural air conditioner, and without them, Tampa Bay had little way to cool down.

Dry air brings the heat

It’s not uncommon for Tampa Bay’s average temperatures to peak in May before dipping later in the summer. Clear weather allows the sun to bake the area before summer’s typical afternoon showers begin, according to Stephen Shiveley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Tampa Bay office.

In June and July, when rainy season is in full swing, temperatures usually only climb into the low 90s. It can feel hotter during those mid-summer months because humidity pushes the feels-like temperature into the triple digits.

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“I always tell people temperature-wise it’s our hottest time of the year,” he said. “Because it’s drier, our temperatures are allowed to get up into the upper 90s.”

But this May was especially dry, with only an inch of rain falling. The average is about three inches.

The lack of rain led to drought.

Southern parts of Hillsborough and Manatee counties were at “moderate drought” levels last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Dry conditions across the area have pushed officials to use an abundance of caution: Pasco County issued an emergency burn ban Friday prohibiting campfires, garbage burning and other open fires. Manatee County also has passed a ban.

The rainy season in Tampa Bay officially began on May 25, though it often takes time for the gears to start turning.

”It’s not so much a hard date as a transition period,” Flannery said. “We’re definitely in the transition period.”

Flannery said several factors have to come together for the area to slide comfortably into the rainy season.

For one, meteorologists look to the Gulf of Mexico. Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf are rising, but experts are more interested with temperatures deep below the surface. Deeper offshore water has to reach 82 degrees before steady rain patterns move in. Flannery said water temperatures are just about there.

Another factor is how much moisture is in the air. For now, meteorologists are measuring just baseline amounts of moisture. More moisture is likely to accumulate in the coming months, Flannery said.

Lastly, the Bermuda High, an area of high pressure in the North Atlantic, must be in a certain position.

The location of the high influences Tampa Bay’s wind patterns and our summer thunderstorms. It was a major factor in why summer storms were largely absent last year.

”So the big things are: It needs to be warm enough, it needs to be enough moisture and we need to have the prevailing weather patterns in place,” Flannery said. “We’re just kind of right at the point where we’re starting to get there.”

This week’s forecast from the weather service shows at least a 40% chance of rain each day and there already have been scattered showers. Despite elevated rain chances, highs will continue to push into the lower to mid 90s throughout the week.

“We’re not talking enough widespread rainfall, enough cloud cover, to really make a substantial difference in temperatures yet,” Flannery said.

The Gulf of Mexico is running hot

If you’ve taken a dip at the beach or in Tampa Bay over the past month and thought to yourself something along the lines of “I don’t remember the water being this hot last May” — you’d be right.

Water temperatures from the beach to the bay last week reached their highest levels of the year by exceeding 90 degrees at both Clearwater Beach and near Port Manatee in southern Tampa Bay, according to an analysis of temperature data overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Port Manatee hit 91.2 degrees on May 29, more than five degrees hotter than the same timeframe last year.

The water off Clearwater Beach hit 90.7 degrees on Wednesday, its highest reading so far this year, data show. Over the same week last year, water at Clearwater Beach was more comfortable at 84 degrees.

Through the end of April, temperatures on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico were running cooler than last year. But they have climbed since. In the coming weeks, record-hot Atlantic water will sweep into the Gulf and join the intensifying summer sun in warming the gulf’s surface even more, according to Yonggang Liu, director of the University of South Florida’s Ocean Circulation Lab.

As of mid-May, the Gulf’s ocean heat content – or the total amount of heat stored not just on the surface of the water but below it, too – was the hottest it has been for this time of year since record keeping began more than a decade ago, according to Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

The main driver of that heat is an ocean eddy that is swirling through the eastern Gulf of Mexico as it juts north through the Caribbean, hooks clockwise through the Gulf and exits out the Florida Straits. The looping current, which can be a common oceanographic phenomena, has siphoned a patch of hot water into the eastern Gulf in recent weeks, McNoldy said.

″(Ocean heat content) started to jump up to above-average in the second week of May, then it really went nuts after that,” McNoldy said. “That loop current really just became a pretty major feature. It’s definitely still hefty out there.”

The eddies swirl in deep sections of the Gulf. While Hurricane Idalia last year rapidly intensified into a major hurricane in shallower Gulf water — further north and out of reach from the eddy currently forming now — ocean eddies forming in deeper water can still help provide fuel for storms churning their way through the Gulf, Liu said.

Most of the hot near-shore sea temperatures in the Tampa Bay area right now, which are anomalously warm, could be from the dry and mostly cloud-free conditions in recent weeks, McNoldy said.

”The ocean just gets to cook,” he said.