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Lee and Collier
Both Southwest Florida forecast offices wrote a fresh heat advisory overnight for a third straight day, and for the first time in this run the top of the range came down at each of them and Collier lost an hour off the back of the window
Money & World
The Editorial Team · August 20, 2026
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Stock photo. Not the actual scene. Photo: saravut vanset / Pexels
What it changes
For the third morning running Lee and Collier are under heat advisories, and for the first time in this run the news is that the numbers eased rather than held. The Tampa Bay Ruskin office, which covers Lee, has written a heat index of up to 109 where it had 112 yesterday and the day before. The Miami office, which covers Collier, has written up to 110 where it had a range of 105 to 112. Three degrees off the top in Lee, two in Collier. That is not relief and nobody should read it as relief, because a heat index of 109 or 110 is still hot enough for the advisory to exist at all, but it does mean today is forecast to sit a step below the peak of this stretch rather than at it. The second change is the practical one, and it is about hours rather than degrees. Both counties still start at 11 a.m. They no longer finish together. Lee runs to 7 p.m., the same eight hour window Tampa Bay has used since the middle of last week. Collier now runs to 6 p.m., an hour shorter, and that is the first time either office has moved off that eight hour block across the run of advisories this desk has tracked since late July. So a landscaping crew working Bonita Springs on the Lee side and a crew working Naples on the Collier side are now under advisories that expire an hour apart. There is a third difference worth naming because it is easy to misread. Yesterday Tampa Bay did not write a new advisory for Lee; it continued the one already running, while Miami wrote a fresh one for Collier, which left the two counties under products of different vintage. This morning both offices wrote new ones. The paperwork is back in step even as the hours have come apart, and neither fact says anything about one county being in more danger than the other. Lee falls under Tampa Bay and Collier falls under Miami, and the two offices number and issue their heat products separately without reference to each other. The people the back half of these windows is aimed at have not changed: roofers, landscapers, pool and pressure washing crews, road crews, tradespeople loading trucks at the end of a shift, and anyone whose day does not stop at five. Both offices rate the product as moderate in severity and both had it written before ten past one in the morning, so nobody in Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, Estero, Lehigh Acres, Naples, Marco Island, Immokalee or Golden Gate has to wait on a mid-morning enlargement to know what today looks like. Miami is the office giving the fuller instruction this morning, adding to the standard advice about fluids and air conditioning a line about limiting strenuous activity to early morning or evening and acting on the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. What none of this tells you is how long the run has left. Each product carries no forecast of its own past this evening, and the next advisory, or the absence of one, will be written tonight in the same small hours as this one.
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