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