Tallahassee’s Unique Meteorology and Extreme Weather Events

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As soon as we started talking about Tallahassee weather, Dr. Ryan Truchelut started listing extreme weather events from the last few years. Hurricanes, tornadoes, and, most surprisingly of all, a blanketing of ice and snow. Ryan is the WeatherTiger. His company creates forecasts for the agricultural industry, and he writes a newsletter and a column for the Tallahassee Democrat.

Ryan was a guest on the most recent episode of Coast to Canopy. This episode is a preview for the Water Wind Fire Conference on October 3-4, at the Monticello Opera House. He is presenting along with our other guests, archeologist Dr. James Dunbar and Jenny Rogers, a Remote Sensing and Geospatial Technology Analyst with Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy.

I wrote a separate blog post for our conversation with Jim and Jenny; their presentations focus on mapping and visualizing the natural world. We also talked a bit about the technology each researcher uses, and the role of AI and big data.

This discussion is solely about the weather and climate in our area, which, is remarkable even when it’s not extreme.

Full schedule and presenter info for the Water-Wind-Fire Conference.

Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.

Years of extreme weather events on the Florida panhandle

Ryan Truchelut: In the last two years here in Tallahassee, we’ve had the warmest month in Tallahassee history, August 2023, that ended with the first major hurricane landfall ever in Apalachee Bay, Idalia.

We then followed that up with the most impactful tornado outbreak in Tallahassee history in May of 2024. We followed that up with the first category four hurricane landfall ever in Apalachee Bay in Helene, and we wrapped it all up with probably the most impactful winter ice storm that we’ve ever had in January of 2025. So, no rest for the weary as a forecaster and as a meteorologist.

But I want to put those kind of extreme events into a historical context because, you know, we have a long historical record that we can look at here in North Florida. We’ve got good temperature records going back to the late 19th century. We’ve got records of snowfall, we’ve got records of hurricane landfalls that go back 175 years in a very rigorous way.

And we’ve got hundreds of years more data, kind of piecemeal from writings and paleotempestology, which is digging up sediments and looking for layers indicative of historical landfalls. So I’m going to be looking at, what we can expect from the climate of North Florida? What is it? What are the influences that shape our weather?

Tallahassee’s unique meteorology

Ryan Truchelut: It’s a fascinating place meteorologically because Tallahassee is right on the cusp between, on one hand, to the north, you have a continental climate. Continental climates tend to be hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Cold air is generated from basically air over land masses for long periods of time. So you can have extended periods of time when there’s not a marine influence on the weather.

Here in North Florida, on the other hand, we’re 20 miles from the Gulf. And, the Gulf has warmed with time. We’re much warmer now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. And that is a subtropical and even a tropical influence on our weather. So, I’m going to be going back and, looking at all those forms of impactful weather, like extreme heat, extreme cold snow, ice, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and looking at the, other influences on that from the perspective of both, diagnosing… how does El Niño, how does La Niña come into play and modulate those risks?

Tallahassee reaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as below freezing temperatures, more often than anywhere else in Florida.

Ryan Truchelut: Absolutely. North Florida is the hottest part of Florida in the summer, both in terms of average daytime high temperatures, but also in terms of potential extreme. So the hottest temperatures ever in the state of Florida, as well as the coldest temperatures ever in the state of Florida, have happened in the central and eastern Panhandle. The hottest day ever in Tallahassee was, I believe, in 2010, and it hit 105 degrees.

Temperatures in the rest of Florida

Ryan Truchelut: If you go back and you look at other major cities across Florida, just this summer Tampa for the first time ever recorded a 100 degree day. And, I believe Miami, the Miami metro area has almost never seen 100 degree day either. And that really speaks to the tropical influence on the weather in Central and south Florida being much greater than in North Florida.

For instance, in Miami, down at around 25 degrees north latitude, you get pretty strong trade winds out of the east, blowing east to west. And that’s a very typical tropical weather pattern. It’s the same weather pattern that you have in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands or the Lesser Antilles. You get these, basically trade winds that blow through the summer months and those trade winds stop the extremes in heat that we can see in North Florida because the water temperatures historically, in the Bahamas, they’re in the mid 80s.

So, it never can get too high above that water temperature. Now, the flip side of that is, of course the temperature can’t get too far below what the nearby water temperature is either. So, a typical summer day in Miami historically, [is a] high of 90, low of 76. Typical summer day in Tallahassee is much more variable.

If the winds are out of the north, you don’t have that Gulf moisture influence. That’s how you get those days where the high temperature is 100 degrees or more. Now, obviously that’s always been a historical possibility, but we are seeing increased frequency of those temperature extremes, days of 100 or greater over the last two or three decades.

Has north Florida been experiencing more drought lately?

Ryan Truchelut: We are. And one of the big reasons for that is one of the finger prints of climate change is an increased prevalence of La Niña versus El Niño events.

Now, just to provide some context for listeners here, La Niña and El Niño refers to sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, specifically the central equatorial Pacific. We’re talking southwest of Hawaii. We’re talking the vicinity of the International Date Line. So this is far from Florida.

And you might be wondering, okay, great. Why am I talking about sea surface temperatures along the International Date Line? Well, that’s because sea surface temperatures in that area are kind of like a climate pacemaker. They really set the tone for weather patterns worldwide, including in North America.

So, historically, models that have tried to project global weather patterns forward with anthropogenic warming influences have really split on, is there going to be more El Niño? Is there going to be more La Niña? This is sensitive stuff. It’s a feedback between ocean and atmospheric circulation. And it’s tough for models to get that right observationally. However, if you go back and you look at the last 40 years, one of the only places on Earth where average sea surface temperatures are not getting warmer is right in that region where we define El Niño or La Niña events.

More La Niña, less El Niño – more drought in the southeast, and more hurricane landfall

Bottom line, what that means is we’ve got the global oceans are getting way warmer, and you’ve got this little patch of the Pacific that sets the tone for global climate that’s actually trending cooler. So that increased contrast is leading to more frequent La Niña events. We had a three year La Niña that lasted between 2020 and 2023.

We had a one year El Niño event in 2023 that faded out. And then last winter we had yet another La Niña event, and we may well dip back into weak La Niña conditions again in the fall of 2025/ Winter of 2026. So, five years? Six years? Very unusual. Historically, we’ve never actually done that before. There’s only other two instances, where there’s been three consecutive years of La Niña looking back at the historical record as well.

So, La Niña is linked to a global weather pattern that tends to now tends to lead to high pressure systems over the southeastern United States in the fall and going into winter. And high pressure – that’s stable air that’s warmer than average temperatures. And it’s usually promotes drier than average conditions. Unfortunately, La Niña events also promote higher risk of hurricane landfalls in the continental United States generally.

So increased drought prevalence is likely linked to that increased frequency of La Nina events that we’re seeing here over the past few decades.

Harnessing data sets to predict the weather

Ryan Truchelut: What I’m doing at WeatherTiger primarily is I’m taking data sets that are being made available publicly through the National Weather Service, through NOAA. By law, all those data sets, any data that the NWS or NOAA are generating, must be made available to the public at no charge. But there’s a profusion of data. There’s far more data available than we’re able to make sense out of.

What I’m doing is I’m going into those data sets and I’m using my scientific training from my academic life to responsibly extract insights from that data set and turn them into forecasts that are useful and usable for my clients. My clients can include people who are reading the newspaper or reading my Substack newsletter or the clients that I’m working with in agricultural meteorology.

So, what I’m doing is I’m going back and I’m identifying the patterns… to say, this is going to be a bad hurricane season, or this is going to be a not so bad hurricane season.

That democratization of data, it’s a great thing. It’s what I’ve made my career on, basically. The flip side of that is that with so much data available, if you do not have a scientific background, if you do not have the scientific training or… Let’s take a step further back. If you are a bad actor who’s looking to construct a narrative for hyping up extreme events or making irresponsible predictions to scare people, you certainly have the ability to do that with the wide variety of weather models and modeling data that’s available.

Hurricane Erin Example

Ryan Truchelut: So, great example. Out there right now, we have what I think just became Hurricane Erin [the podcast was recorded on August 15, 2025]. There was chatter from social meteorologists that Erin was going to be a threat to Florida and that just never was the case. That was always something that was an extreme outlier possibility.

But if you were just perusing social media, it wouldn’t feel like that to you. You have your emotions played upon, to feel fear, to be afraid that this is going to be a highly impactful event when in fact, there really was never more than a 10% chance of any significant weather impacts on the US East Coast.

As I like to say, bad information can circle the globe before good information puts its pants on. And I feel like a lot of what I’m doing is just kind of fighting these rearguard actions to say, no: this is this is kind of the responsible take on this.

Weather Media Literacy

Ryan Truchelut: The great thing about weather is it’s a pretty short-fused system when you’re making predictions. It’s very prediction based, and you get to have a W or an L in a week or two. So I would urge listeners to keep track of the wins and losses of the weather data sources that they’re relying on.

No forecaster is perfect. I certainly have made errors and made mistakes. It’s just part of the job. There’s an inherent uncertainty into making forecasts… The job of a good forecaster is to communicate that uncertainty, communicate the different possible outcomes. And balance that by – you also want to say something useful that someone can use to make a decision.

You don’t want to say everything is a possibility. But, essentially you do need to balance those two things, that usefulness with the possibility that you could be wrong. You don’t want to be an overconfident forecaster, but at the same time, if your forecast source is saying and alerting you to things over and over again that don’t happen, that are scary, that are frightening, that are extreme, that’s an L. Keep track of that.

Don’t follow data sources that are leading you astray over and over again. And it’s an easier thing to do in meteorology than it is and in some other fields, too.

The 2025 Hurricane Season – predictions?

Rob Diaz de Villegas: Before I move on, what’s the forecast for this hurricane season?

Ryan Truchelut: Well, I don’t think it’ll be as bad as last hurricane season. I don’t see the signs that we’re heading for what we would call a hyperactive hurricane season where we’re 165% or more of of an average hurricane season. But I do think it will be a generally busy hurricane season, busier than our 50 year or 75 year averages.

Last year at this time, my forecast models were indicating that the US was likely to see a total of four or five hurricane landfalls in the continental United States over the course of the season. And we had five unfortunately. This year, that range is one to three, and normal is one to two. So, we’re putting a little more probability on in the two to three range than the one to two range that we normally do.

But I’d say there’s, you know, a 75% chance that we’ll see between one and three United States hurricane landfalls between now and the end of the year.

Rob Diaz de Villegas: All right, well, we’ll check back on that.

Ryan Truchelut: Keep track of those wins and losses. That applies to me, too.

Ryan later weighed in on the good and the bad of using artificial intelligence to predict extreme weather events. That was part of our tech discussion, which you can read in this blog post, or watch in the video above.