The rain runs on a schedule

A little while back we started keeping our own weather diary - one reading every hour, temperature, humidity and rainfall, logged and set aside. Two months later we have 1,464 hourly readings stretching from mid-April to mid-June, and they tell a story anyone who's stood under a porch roof at 4pm already knows in their bones. The rain here isn't random. It runs on a schedule.

Half the days, but never the mornings

Measurable rain fell on 30 of the 61 days - call it half. That sounds like a lot of soggy afternoons, and it would be, if the rain showed up at random. It doesn't. Sort every drop by the hour it fell and the day splits cleanly in two. From about 6 to 11 in the morning, rain is genuinely rare. Then it begins to build through lunch, and from 3pm to 9pm the sky does almost all of its work for the day. The single wettest hour, totaled across two months, is the one starting at 4pm.

So the headline isn't "it rains half the time." It's that the rain keeps banker's hours in reverse: closed all morning, open all afternoon. If you want a dry tee time, a dry walk, or a dry pickleball game, the forecast has been telling you the same thing for sixty days straight - go early.

How much, and the day it really meant it

All told, 6.83 inches of rain came down over the two months. Most days that got wet only got a little wet; the average rainy day was more drizzle than deluge. The exception was May 12, which alone dropped 2.06 inches - a genuine soaker that accounted for nearly a third of the whole period's rain in a single day. And for the dry-weather optimists: the longest stretch without a drop ran seven straight days.

The heat is humble; the humidity is not

Temperatures were exactly what you'd order from a Central Florida spring rolling into summer. The average afternoon high was 87 degrees, the average overnight low 69. We crossed 90 degrees on 22 of the 61 days - about a third of them - and the hottest single reading was a 94.6-degree mid-afternoon on May 8. The coolest moment was an almost-sweater-worthy 56.8 degrees at dawn on April 21.

But the real story isn't the thermometer, it's the 70 percent average humidity. That's why the "feels like" number climbed to 95 or hotter for 85 hours across 27 different days. The air does the heavy lifting here. A plain 88-degree afternoon can feel like a wall, and the data agrees.

Which is exactly why we put a sky on the page

None of this is a complaint. It's a rhythm, and once you can see it, you can plan around it. The mornings are cooler and nearly always dry; the afternoons are warm and increasingly likely to rumble. That's the whole reason we surface a little weather heads-up at the top of the calendar - so when the radar starts to light up on schedule, we can nudge you toward the morning courts and the indoor half of the day. The sky around here keeps an appointment book. We just thought you might like to read it too.