2023 weather: A Palm Beach Gardens tornado, record heat and much more

A torture of humidity yet salvation from hurricanes marked 2023’s weather in southeast Florida with sizzling heat records toppled or challenged but no tropical cyclone threats in an otherwise bustling storm season.

In West Palm Beach, it was the second hottest year since record-keeping began more than a century ago in 1888. The average temperature at Palm Beach International Airport measured 78 degrees, which is a significant 2 degrees warmer than the 30-year norm.

Fort Lauderdale also ranked second for 2023's feverish warmth, while Miami International Airport and Naples topped their climatological heat peak, crushing records dating to 1895 and 1942, respectively.

When will the misery end?: Palm Beach County under excessive heat warning.

“What seemed like almost continuous heat in 2023 was defined by a record hot summer that shattered not only temperature records but also the duration of high heat index values,” said National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologist Robert Molleda in his annual summary of South Florida weather events. “This is no small feat.”

While the high temperatures soured moods and hiked electric bills in 2023, the atmosphere stirred havoc in Palm Beach County in other ways.

A violent EF-2 tornado tore through Palm Beach Gardens, golf ball-size hailstones fell in Jupiter, a waterspout harried the shores of Boca Raton and a rare “wake low” — a double-whammy of powerful gusts and downpours — bullied through South Florida in November with wind gusts as high as 75 mph.

Still, it was the sultry days of summer that took center stage.

“There really was no other summer like it here,” said University of Miami Senior Research Associate Brian McNoldy. “Records are normally broken here and there and by a little bit, but we were breaking records by giant amounts, and often.”

Alarmingly warm sea surface temperatures that were still about 3.5 degrees above normal along Palm Beach County’s coast in early October contributed to the summer humidity as evaporation saturated the air.

When a heat advisory was issued in June for “feels like” or heat index temperatures that could reach 108 degrees, it was considered rare.

But the high humidity, which causes our natural cooling mechanism — sweat — to falter, clung to South Florida for weeks.

Where Florida's headed: 126 days with temps that feel like 105 degrees

The National Weather Service does not track heat index temperatures but McNoldy has started crunching data for Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

He found in Miami that the previous record of consecutive days reaching 100-degree plus heat index temperatures was 32 in 2020. It jumped to 46 last year. At the 105-degree plus heat index level, the record was eight consecutive days set in 2017.

“In 2023 we bumped that up to 16 days in a row,” McNoldy said. “We broke almost every record that exists.”

Climate change behind weather trends of higher temperatures, more humidity

McNoldy, as well as other climate scientists, are hesitant to pin a single event or summer season on climate change, but he said it’s acting in the background with trends showing warmer temperatures even if they vary year-by-year.

West Palm Beach’s top four hottest years on record have all occurred since 2015, with 2020 being the warmest at 78.3 degrees. That was followed by 2023, 2015, 2022 and 2011.

“I think climate change has its finger on everything,” McNoldy said.

A feeble Bermuda High anchored in the eastern Atlantic Ocean also contributed to the heat, robbing southeast Florida of its normally reliable summer sea breezes.

But the high, which was weakened by an El Niño influenced jet stream, is also what steered tropical cyclones away from southeast Florida as they zipped around its clockwise swirl of winds and out to sea.

Despite an above-active hurricane season with 20 named storms, South Florida “evaded the forecast cone for the first time since 2014,” said Michael Lowry, a meteorologist with South Florida ABC affiliate Channel 10, in an end-of-season newsletter.

Who won?: El Niño battled warm ocean temperatures during the above average 2023 hurricane season

North Carolina spent the most time in the hurricane forecast cone last year at 174 hours, according to Lowry’s calculations. Maine was second with 168 hours spent in the hurricane cone.

“In wild contrast, Louisiana and South Florida — two of the nation’s most hurricane-prone areas — didn’t spend a single minute of 2023 inside a forecast cone,” wrote meteorologists Bob Henson and Jeff Masters in a story for Yale Climate Connections.

Palm Beach Gardens tornado included in Top 5 weather events for South Florida

Included in the Top 5 list of 2023 weather events compiled by the Miami office of the National Weather Service were the extended drought conditions on the Gulf Coast, the extreme rainfall of more than 20 inches in Fort Lauderdale on April 12, the record warmth, an unusual gusty and wet weather event Nov. 16 that dropped more than 6 inches of rain in parts of Palm Beach County, and the EF-2 tornado in Palm Beach Gardens on April 29.

Meteorologists dissecting the ingredients that spawned the late April tornado with peak winds of 130 mph said the atmosphere aloft was more winter-like than spring. A river of strong frigid winds high in the atmosphere belied a tropical balm at the surface where daytime temperatures hit 89 degrees in West Palm Beach — 5 degrees warmer than normal — ahead of the twister.

Photos: After EF-2 tornado, residents and business owners still cleaning up in northern Palm Beach

That surface heat rushed high into the atmosphere forming towering clouds and sewing the seeds for thunderstorms that ultimately dropped a tornado to Earth at about 5:10 p.m. It stayed on the ground for 11 minutes, traveling more than 2.5 miles. Its path was 320 yards wide at points, bigger than three football fields.

In the Sanctuary Cove community near Prosperity Farms Road, the tornado tore through roofs, broke windows and ripped bark from trees. From there, it headed north-northeast, crushing a manufactured home, flipping cars and destroying a dry-cleaning business.

"I felt like I was going to die,” Jenna Hayes told a Palm Beach Post reporter weeks after the tornado struck her neighborhood. “There's absolutely no time to say your prayers."

November storm a 'close second' to Hurricane Irma in 2017

In mid-November, forecasters warned of blustery weather before two days of heavy rain and damaging winds struck South Florida during what was later identified as a “wake low.” The wake low, also called a wake depression, formed at the edge of a curtain of rainfall draped across the state. Mid-level warm sinking air collided with rain-cooled air flooding down and out from the area of precipitation.

Regardless of the physics, it created wind gusts in West Palm Beach that reached 56 mph, and were as high as 75 mph at an elevated maritime station at Port Miami’s Government Cut. Broward County canceled classes as some streets flooded and were choked with stalled vehicles. Tens of thousands of people lost electricity.

In Lantana, the oceanfront Dune Deck Café suffered damage to its canopy, which was flipped over its roof, waves crashed over the seawall in the Town of Palm Beach, and downtown West Palm Beach streets filled with brackish Lake Worth Lagoon water buoyed by tides and thumping surf.

McNoldy said the impacts of the wake low at his home near Biscayne Park were a "close second" to 2017's Hurricane Irma.

"Power is off and on, Internet is out, watermain breaks, etc.,” he said in a Nov. 16 social media post. “This was a very significant event.”

Kimberly Miller is a veteran journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate and how growth affects South Florida's environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. Help support our local journalism, subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Tornadoes, floods and record heat hit South Florida in 2023