Marine Weather and Tide Forecast for Key Colony Beach, FL

FXUS62 KKEY 121858 AFDKEY

Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Key West FL 258 PM EDT Mon May 12 2025

New DISCUSSION, MARINE, AVIATION

DISCUSSION
Issued at 300 PM EDT Mon May 12 2025 Some showers are floating around the island chain right now, but an overall lull in activity is still ongoing. KBYX radar detects a mass of showers in our deep Gulf waters drifting northeast past the Lower Keys while residual showers from this morning continue to bubble in the Florida Straits off of the Upper Keys. While no major convective structure looks to be on the western horizon, Cuban convection is percolating and starting to drift north into the outer Straits. High cloud cover has mostly held together over the Keys today resulting in some lower temperatures in the lower to mid 80s. However, the little clearing over the Lower Keys did result in some highs reaching the upper 80s. Our windfield is quite varied depending on where it is measured from. Gentle to moderate breezes are observed along the Reef with more southerly directions in the west and easterly directions in the east. The confluence this pattern is promoting is helping convection along the western mainland Florida coast but has yet to spark anything in our waters.

Despite this extended lull in activity, rain chances are still high for tonight. The area of deep troughing centered about the Mississippi River Valley will start lifting north tonight.
Simultaneously, its surface axis will pivot towards the Florida Peninsula with its corridor of deep tropical moisture in tow.
While it seems the moisture and instability from some daytime heating will be present, a source of lift seems to be the bottleneck for tonight's round of storms. Multiple CAMs are showing a handful of solutions for convective impacts tonight including a variety of development locations and intensities.
Based on current radar trends, the forecast is currently favoring the solutions where outflows from Cuban convection spark storms that move towards the island chain from the south overnight. This all being said, the CAMs did all seem to agree that the start time of precipitation being near the island chain would be somewhere near 00z. Whether or not these storms will actually cross the island chain will be up in the air until they actually form.

As the deep layer troughing exits to the north, high pressure will start filling in over Florida. Some of the deep moisture looks to linger around Tuesday, but will soon fall victim to intruding dry air circulating through the thermodynamic profile. Rain chances will therefore gradually fall until reaching near normal status Wednesday night. Breezes will gradually slacken as they veer to the northwest to north and eventually become variable later on Wednesday. As the high settles in the western North Atlantic, light to gentle east to southeast breezes will return by the end of the week before freshening over the weekend.
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