Autumn Has Arrived, So Have A Hot Day, Floridians

Fall arrives today, or so the calendar says.

It may mean something to the rest of the country, but in Florida, where the peak of the sultry hurricane season passed less than two weeks ago, summer drags on.

A more meaningful benchmark in the weather cycle comes in a week and a half, on Oct. 1. Call it wildfire season.

It brings seven months of drier weather and plumes of smoke on the horizon.

In fact, meteorologists say, Florida essentially has just two seasons - "wildfire," from October through April, and "lightning," from May through September.

The four seasons revolve around the sun, changing with the winter and summer solstices, when Earth is tilted on its axis either farthest from or closest to the sun, and spring and fall equinox, when daylight and night are each 12 hours long.

Those celestial movements certainly apply in Florida but they don't signal the shift in weather cycles the way they do, say, up North.

That's a shame for people who cherish the change, such as Nicole McCullen, who came here from Rockford, Mich.

Even after 10 years in Florida, she misses crisp afternoons on the gridiron back home. A Tampa Bay Buccaneers game at 90 degrees just isn't the same.

"I certainly miss fall football and Indian summer," McCullen said. "September is the time of year you expect it to cool down."

Wildfire season starts when the afternoon rains shut down.

This year in Florida, there have been nearly 2,500 wildfires, which burned more than 155,000 acres.

That's less than half the sweep of last year's season, though, when 4,900 fires charred 578,000 acres.

The ferocious 2007 season, in fact, eclipsed the 1998 fire season when the same number of fires consumed more than 509,000 acres.

The season peaks in March through April, as temperatures rise during some of Florida's driest months and vegetation turns to tinder.

Lightning season gets under way in May, thunders into its peak in July and tapers off in September.

The entire Florida peninsula erupts with thunderstorms, mostly in the afternoon, with each square mile in the state averaging 26 lightning bolts a year for a total of about 1.5 million strikes.

A band from the Tampa Bay area to Cape Canaveral is the lightning capital, receiving up to 40 lightning strikes per square mile.

Florida also leads the nation in lightning deaths with 74 between 1998 and 2007.

Florida's climate office considers fall to be the time when morning temperatures drop below 60 degrees two days in a row.

That usually happens the first week in November.

The average high temperature in the state as fall begins is 88 degrees, 3 degrees lower than the average high in mid-summer.

Officially this year, fall starts today at 11:44 a.m., which is the moment when the center of the sun is directly overhead if you're standing on the equator.

The equator is also where daylight and darkness match up exactly that day.

In Tampa, daylight and darkness will each last 12 hours next Friday.