Cold hurries Bay area harvests

The threat of freezing temperatures that started Sunday and won't end until Wednesday could stretch from the strawberry fields of Hillsborough County to the vegetable growing area south of Lake Okeechobee.

The cold temperatures that greeted you this morning aren't going anywhere, and certainly not up.

Lows in the 30s combined with a light wind could make this morning feel like the middle-20s around Tampa and in the teens in Hernando County.

Cold weather shelters took in hundreds of people Sunday night in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties. Pinellas County plans to open its 10 shelters again tonight, while emergency management officials in Hillsborough and Pasco will decide today whether they need to again open their shelters.

The string of cold days and frosty nights comes from an area of high pressure that's helping funnel a blast of frigid Canadian air over Florida. That high pressure isn't going to budge for a couple days.

The potential for freezing temperatures extends until Thursday morning, when a slight warming trend shows up. The warming will be slight.

Though Friday morning is the first this week the National Weather Service isn't calling for a freeze, the low around Tampa on Friday morning is still expected to be in the middle-30s.

People living in Hernando face the possibility of a hard freeze, with temperatures dropping into the low-20s through Thursday morning.

Residents won't have much time to bask in the relative warmth of Thursday as another cold front is expected to move in and send temperatures plunging again on Friday night.

Those forecasts will have strawberry growers such as Gary Parke spending more sleepless nights, like Saturday, when he watched the thermometer's drop stop just above freezing.

"We've got another three or four days of this," Parke, of Parkesdale Farms in Plant City, said Sunday.

Parkesdale Farms crews spent much of Sunday harvesting what berries they could.

Freeze warnings went up Sunday for Hillsborough, and the weather service issued a hard freeze warning for Hernando County north.

Though temperatures could drop enough to threaten strawberry crops, forecast lows for the citrus growing areas of Polk County don't call for temperatures to drop to the 27-degree level that would damage trees.