Why has Central Florida been getting so much rain lately?

ORLANDO, Fla. – Yes, there’s a rainy season for Central Florida. Climatologically, the rainy season begins in late May and lasts through the middle of October and it can vary year to year. The summer heat, humidity and seabreezes (which are differences in temperatures between the ocean waters and land) make up the perfect recipe for thunderstorms to develop across east Central Florida.

Lately, we’ve been seeing daily thunderstorms produce heavy rain, which has led to flooding in a few areas and strong gusty winds with other modes of storm threats. Well, it’s actually typical and expected for this time of the year.

Rainy season for east Central Florida began in late May, and it lasts through the middle of October. But what’s also interesting is that we’ve been stuck under a very unusual weather pattern for the last several days.

An upper-level low has been stuck north of the area with a cold front which has been stalling out now and again. This type of weather setup helps thunderstorm development and it keeps our weather pattern unsettled.

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A combination of the sea breezes, hot-and-humid air and that upper-level low has been resulting in thunderstorms continuing to fire up daily.

During the summer months, cold fronts come to a halt in our area. With little to no cold front moving through, the sea breezes continue to increase the moisture in the atmosphere. So when thunderstorms get going, there’s plenty of moisture for the storms to tap into to produce heavy rain.

While nuisance flooding has been happening lately in a few areas, one county has been dealing with the relentless rain for the past several days and saw record rainfall a few days ago. Ocala picked up 4.39 inches of rainfall on Tuesday, which was record-breaking.

That amount of rain and the daily rainfall prior led to major flooding problems in that area. Marion County has been under a Flood Watch for the past couple of days due to the daily heavy rainfall.

Other counties across Central Florida have also been dealing with nuisance street flooding in the past couple of days. Some spots were picking up a couple of inches daily. In the past 12 hours, some areas picked up between 1-2 inches, according to the radar.

With more than 50 years of rainfall data collected by the National Weather Service, it has been determined that the median date for the rainy season for a few cities is as follows.

The end of the wet season for Orlando and Daytona Beach is Oct. 15. The end of the rainy season for Melbourne and Vero Beach is Oct. 17.