Lee County joins Collier under a heat advisory on Tuesday, the first day this week both halves of Southwest Florida are covered, with the window shifted an hour later at each end to noon until 7 p.m.
Both Lee and Collier counties are under a heat advisory on Tuesday, August 11, running from noon to 7 p.m.
They are covered by two different products written by two different offices. The National Weather Service office in Tampa Bay Ruskin sent its advisory at 2.32 a.m., covering twenty zones across southwest and west central Florida, and Coastal Lee and Inland Lee are among them. It forecasts heat index values of up to 109.
The Miami office sent its own advisory at 2.05 a.m., covering fifteen zones across south Florida including Coastal Collier and Inland Collier, with an index range of 105 to 110. Both products carry the same hours, both are rated moderate in severity and likely in certainty, and both expire at 7 p.m.
Monday looked different. Collier was under an advisory then and Lee was not, and three separate queries of the Lee zones shortly after half past four on Monday morning returned nothing active at all.
The hours have moved as well. Monday's Collier advisory ran from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., so today's window sits an hour later at each end.
The Tampa Bay product is marked as a continuation rather than a new event, carrying event number 0011, which means that office opened the event at some point after the Monday morning reads that found the Lee zones empty. The Miami product is marked new and carries event number 0027, one higher than the 0026 it issued on Monday. A heat advisory is normally rewritten each morning because the hazard lapses overnight, so a fresh event number from Miami is the ordinary pattern rather than a sign of anything unusual.
The reason the two counties keep moving independently is administrative rather than meteorological. Lee falls under the Tampa Bay Ruskin forecast office and Collier falls under Miami, and the two write their heat products on separate event numbers without reference to each other.
The Tampa Bay headline on the product reads that the advisory remains in effect from noon today to 7 p.m. this evening. The Miami headline reads that it is in effect for the same hours.
The instruction in both is the service's own: drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check up on relatives and neighbours. Both add that anyone outside should wear lightweight and loose fitting clothing, try to limit strenuous activity to early morning or evening, and act on the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke rather than push through them.
