Rare rain streak for soggy Orlando
City’s had 13 days of showers so far — and there’s more to come
Orlando has had 13 days of measured rain so far in one of the normally driest months of the year, giving the city a taste of Seattle weather.
The most Orlando rain days in December is 18, occurring in 1905 and 1914. Both 1976 and 1997 had 15 rain days. Holding third place with 13 days are 1898 and 2019.
Orlando has had 5 inches, or about double the month’s normal amount, which will stand as the city’s eighth-wettest December on record. Much of the region has had a top-10 wettest December.
That’s not the whole story. The National Weather Service recorded a trace of rain in Orlando on five days this month. A trace isn’t considered to be measurable, but those days were still often misty, foggy and soggy.
The 18 days with measurable or trace of rain in Orlando, located in the heart of the Sunshine State, nearly has kept up with the 20 such days in Seattle, reputed for having some of the nation’s dreariest climate.
Derrick Weitlich, climate program leader at the National Weather Service office in Melbourne, said December’s wetter
weather isn’t attributable to a major factor – an El Nino pattern, for example.
“We had a few more frontal systems,” Weitlich said.
But even with the soggy weather this month, Orlando is still no Seattle, where this month an “atmospheric river causes record rain and darkness,” according to a news headline there.
Orlando will close out the month and year with sunny and dry weather.
An Iowan couple, Mindy and Brad Carlson, visited Lake Eola after their team’s appearance in the Camping World Bowl, having noted but not disagreed with the wet weather in a city they thought of as ordinarily sunny.
The low temperature Sunday in their home city of Des Moines was 28 degrees. In Orlando, it was 71. “The temperature is much better,” Brad Carlson said. “It’s so warm” she said.