florida Florida Freeze and Weather Station Data

[flplantguy]

@kinzyjr have you checked out the PRISM climate group webpage yet?  https://prism.oregonstate.edu/

I was playing with it and found a map they use model data with to project weather info including low temps each day.  I guess it was used for the update to the hardiness zone map too. It was interesting to look at what it said for the lows here in 2010, just at or below freezing for days, with the slight warmup in the middle and the drop to 25 at the end.  Matches the damage on street views too.

[kinzyjr]

31 minutes ago, flplantguy said:

@kinzyjr have you checked out the PRISM climate group webpage yet?  https://prism.oregonstate.edu/

I was playing with it and found a map they use model data with to project weather info including low temps each day.  I guess it was used for the update to the hardiness zone map too. It was interesting to look at what it said for the lows here in 2010, just at or below freezing for days, with the slight warmup in the middle and the drop to 25 at the end.  Matches the damage on street views too.

I've played with it a bit.  Not a bad tool to use to see the general patterns of cold snaps in the state.  The Jan. 2010 map looked pretty good when paged through day-by-day.  The algorithm used to generated the new hardiness map for Florida is somewhat flawed from my perspective.  Polk County's zoning was a little too monolithic.  The stations that averaged zone 10a seem to have dominated the map in areas where it is common to lose 9b and 10a palms.

[kinzyjr]

For those that like going back further in time than the standard NOAA records we can download, you can check out the COOP records for some stations in each state here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/coop/coop.html

I'd always wondered how Lakeland might have fared during some of the freezes previous to the cutoff in the 1940s.

Turns out the Feb. 1917 freeze yielded a low of 24F and the January 1940 freeze recorded a minimum of 23F. (see PDF attachments)

19170201_Lakeland.pdf 19400101_Lakeland.pdf

[kinzyjr]

The 2024 version of the Florida Weather Almanac is attached.  Updates include:

• New stations - including the St. Augustine Airport and the Ocala Airport.
• More data scraped for smaller airports and other points of interest.
• More of the NOAA stations were linked with smaller airports.
• Custom stations (begin with USZ*) were created to post data from some alternate sources. 
  • Some have data now, some do not.
  • Most of these are smaller airports that do not have a NOAA station ID.
  • Some are synonyms of NOAA stations that no longer report data.
  • Stations with little or no data were marked for exclusion and pushed to the bottom of the sheet.
• Additional WeatherUnderground links for smaller airports.
• The Merge and COMP ID columns can be ignored as they are for another project.
• Sheet comes sorted by region.
• An additional sheet includes the Annual Lows recorded for each station.  These were used for the averages and zones.

Enjoy!

2023_Florida_NOAA_Stations_Almanac.xlsx

[kinzyjr]

Over the last couple of years, there have been some opportunities to grab some data for some of the smaller airports in the state and other points of interest that can help more closely define where the climate of the state truly transitions from one "zone" to another.  Regardless of the metric used, it is very apparent to those of us who have traversed the length of the state from the Panhandle to the Keys that certain benchmark palms and other plants that let you know you've crossed some kind of invisible line.

Relying on NOAA data is fine, but when you begin grabbing data from other sources, the need arises to begin using different conventions to track where the data came from, validate it for accuracy, etc.  The various sites, like Weather Underground, AccuWeather, and some of the NWS captures that have been published by all of us who track cold fronts on the site provide valuable insights.

The following have been done to the dataset before uploading to Google Maps:

• Define unique ALIAS IDs for each dataset.
• Split stations into 3 groups:
  • Composite Stations (C): Stations created by combining the records of multiple NOAA stations together where the stations are close by and there is overlap in their records.  A priority indicator ensures the station records with the highest priority are not overwritten where there is overlap.
  • Merged Stations (M): These are usually stations that share latitude and longitude coordinates (ex. Duck Key) or stations that are very close by and have no overlap for their records.
  • Single Stations (S): A single station.
• Gather coordinates for smaller airports and compare them with NOAA stations already defined.  Some of the stations matched up with smaller airports (Ex. Clewiston Number 2 and Airglades Airport).  When a match was found, the airport ID was updated.
• Gather NWS, Weather Underground and AccuWeather links for additional stations.  The first station added this way was Zephyrhills Airport.
• Set parameters to remove "false annual lows" from calculations.  An example of a false annual low would be if a year in Lakeland posted an Annual Low of 65F.  The highest annual lows here are near 40F and that is way outside of normal, usually because too many records for that year are missing.  To do this in a time-efficient manner for over 400 single stations and then compile the results down into 350-360 after composites and merges are done, the TAG regions were used.  Research was done on each of the stations in the TAG group to see what the lowest and highest minimum temperature for that region was over the course of their history.  When calculating the averages, anything outside of these ranges was considered invalid and removed from calculations.

NOTE: Being this is the first time through the process in this manner, there are bound to be a few oversights or mistakes.  If you see anything out of place on the map or the sheet, please feel free to note it.  The lines for the zones are not drawn just yet, but you can peruse the stations on the map and look at the available data.

Map: https://tinyurl.com/2024zoneMap

20240720_ALIAS_ZoneMap_upl.xlsx

[kinzyjr]

Two additional stations have been added to Florida, with one in North Port and one in St. Petersburg:

USC00087887 - ST PETERSBURG 2: Period of record 05/16/2023 - present  This is in a suburb near the Tyrone Square Mall on the southwest portion of the peninsula.

USC00086319 - NORTH PORT:  Began collecting data on 2023-02-01 - present.  This station appears to be in the municipal water plant.