The system brewing near South Florida is an area of low pressure that already has brought a flooding threat to the state with a flood watch up the coast from Miami to Volusia County as well as inland portions of Brevard and Volusia counties.

The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Marathon, Big Pine Key and Key Colony Beach through 7 a.m. Wednesday as bands moved across the state.

The heavy rains that have already dropped as much as 5 inches through Tuesday in some places could combine with king tides along the state’s southeast coast to further the flood threat. The National Weather Service in Miami said some areas of South Florida could see well over 10 inches of rain through Thursday.

For Central Florida, the NWS in Melbourne said the region could see 20-25 mph winds with gusts up to 40 mph along the coast and inland to about Interstate 95 and 15-20 mph winds with 30 mph gusts across the rest of east Central Florida. A wind advisory is in place through at least Thursday afternoon.

Coastal erosion is expected to continue as well with 6- to 9-foot large breaking waves, rough surf and wave runup to the dune line at high tide. Coastal Volusia is still recovering from severe erosion from hurricanes Ian and Nicole in 2022.

“During yesterday morning`s high tide, many beaches were completely covered by surf to the seawall and dunes, and waves were running up into access roads and walkways,” NWS forecasters said.

11/15 7AM Heavy Rainfall Threat Update: Confidence continues to increase regarding the potential for heavy rain beginning later this morning and continuing into Thursday.
Here are the latest probabilities in terms of rainfall amounts across the area. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/f3kXwXuIIm

— NWS Miami (@NWSMiami) November 15, 2023

It’s forecast to move to the northeast near the Bahamas and offshore of the U.S. East Coast into the weekend.

“Although development into a tropical cyclone appears unlikely, this system is expected to produce gusty winds and heavy rains across portions of southern Florida, the Florida Keys and the Bahamas during the next couple of days,” forecasters said.

The NHC gives it a 10% chance to develop in the next two to seven days.

In the southwestern Caribbean, the NHC has dialed back slightly the prediction of development of a large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms from a broad trough of low pressure.

“Environmental conditions appear marginally conducive for development of this system, and a tropical depression could form late this week while the system begins moving northeastward across the western and central portions of the Caribbean Sea,” forecasters said.

It could threaten Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands in the coming days, the NHC warned.

“Regardless of development, this system has the potential to produce heavy rains over portions of the Caribbean coast of Central America and the Greater Antilles through the end of this week,” forecasters said.

The NHC gives it a 40% chance to develop in the next two days and 50% chance in the next seven.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through Nov. 30, has already produced 21 official systems and 19 named storms. The final available names from the year’s initial 21-name list are Vince and Whitney.

In its tropical outlook on Tuesday, the NHC said a broad trough of low pressure in the southwestern Caribbean Sea is producing a large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms.

“Environmental conditions appear conducive for development of this system, and a tropical depression is likely to form during the latter part of the week while moving northeastward across the western and central portions of the Caribbean Sea,” forecasters said.

The system could bring rough weather to Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, the NHC warned.

“Regardless of development, this system has the potential to produce heavy rains over portions of the Caribbean, coast of Central America and the Greater Antilles through the end of this week,” forecasters said.

The NHC gives the system a 20% chance to develop in the next two days and 70% in the next seven.

1 pm EST Nov. 14: A broad area of low pressure is expected to form over the SW Caribbean by Thursday and has a high chance of becoming a tropical depression late this week. Interests in the Greater Antilles should monitor this system's progress.https://t.co/DboWSR4Ct1 pic.twitter.com/9OnyMENUPx

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) November 14, 2023

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season has had 21 official systems, including an unnamed subtropical storm in January and 20 more since the official start of the six-monthlong season that began on June 1.

Of those, 19 have gained at least tropical storm status and taken names from the 21-letter list provided by the World Meteorological Organization, which skips the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z. The next name on the list is Vince.

The end of hurricane season is Nov. 30, but any system that develops in December would also be included in the 2023 tally.

Temperatures will be in the high 60s and low 70s across the region, according to NWS Melbourne.

Onshore winds will be at 15-25mph and are expected to increase to 30-35mph Tuesday afternoon.

There are numerous advisories for hazardous seas, surf and rip currents.

Experts advise residents to stay off boats and away from beaches.

A high tide is expected between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., according to NWS Melbourne.

Volusia and Martin counties are vulnerable to pounding waves on the shoreline.

Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says.

The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level. Unveiling the report at the White House, President Joe Biden blasted Republican legislators and his predecessor for disputing global warming.

“Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future. Impacts are only going to get worse, more frequent, more ferocious and more costly,” Biden said, noting that disasters cost the country $178 billion last year. “None of this is inevitable.”

Overall, Tuesday’s assessment paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future.

Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have warmed by 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) and Alaska has heated up by 4.2 degrees (2.3 degrees Celsius), compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius), the report said. But what people really feel is not the averages, but when weather is extreme.

With heat waves, drought, wildfire and heavy downpours, “we are seeing an acceleration of the impacts of climate change in the United States,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth.

And that’s not healthy.

Climate change is ”harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health and well-being through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, increasing cases of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water quality and security,” the report said.

Compared to earlier national assessments, this year’s uses far stronger language and “unequivocally” blames the burning of coal, oil and gas for climate change.

The 37-chapter assessment includes an interactive atlas that zooms down to the county level. It finds that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority and Native American communities often disproportionately at risk.

In Alaska, which is warming two to three times faster than the global average, reduced snowpack, shrinking glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidifying oceans and disappearing sea ice have affected everything from the state’s growing season, to hunting and fishing, with projections raising questions about whether some Indigenous communities should be relocated.

The Southwest is experiencing more drought and extreme heat – including 31 consecutive days this summer when Phoenix’s daily high temperatures reached or exceeded 110 degrees – reducing water supplies and increasing wildfire risk.

Northeastern cities are seeing more extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality, as well as risks to infrastructure, while drought and floods exacerbated by climate change threaten farming and ecosystems in rural areas.

In the Midwest, both extreme drought and flooding threaten crops and animal production, which can affect the global food supply.

In the northern Great Plains, weather extremes like drought and flooding, as well as declining water resources, threaten an economy dependent largely on crops, cattle, energy production and recreation. Meanwhile, water shortages in parts of the southern Great Plains are projected to worsen, while high temperatures are expected to break records in all three states by midcentury.

In the Southeast, minority and Native American communities — who may live in areas with higher exposures to extreme heat, pollution and flooding — have fewer resources to prepare for or to escape the effects of climate change.

In the Northwest, hotter days and nights that don’t cool down much have resulted in drier streams and less snowpack, leading to increased risk of drought and wildfires. The climate disturbance has also brought damaging extreme rain.

Hawaii and other Pacific islands, as well as the U.S. Caribbean, are increasingly vulnerable to the extremes of drought and heavy rain as well as sea level rise and natural disaster as temperatures warm.

The United States will warm in the future about 40% more than the world as a total, the assessment said. The AP calculated, using others’ global projections, that that means America would get about 3.8 degrees (2.1 degrees Celsius) hotter by the end of the century.

Hotter average temperatures means weather that is even more extreme.

“The news is not good, but it is also not surprising,” said University of Colorado’s Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who was not part of this report. “What we are seeing is a manifestation of changes that were anticipated over the last few decades.”

The 2,200-page report comes after five straight months when the globe set monthly and daily heat records. It comes as the U.S. has set a record with 25 different weather disasters this year that caused at least $1 billion in damage.

“Climate change is finally moving from an abstract future issue to a present, concrete, relevant issue. It’s happening right now,” said report lead author Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University. Five years ago, when the last assessment was issued, fewer people were experiencing climate change firsthand.

Surveys this year by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show that.

In September, about 9 in 10 Americans (87%) said they’d experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years — drought, extreme heat, severe storms, wildfires or flooding. That was up from 79% who said that in April.

Hayhoe said there’s also a new emphasis in the assessment on marginalized communities.

“It is less a matter … of what hits where, but more what hits whom and how well those people can manage the impacts,” said University of Colorado’s Abdalati, whose saw much of his neighborhood destroyed in the 2021 Marshall wildfire.

Biden administration officials emphasize that all is not lost and the report details actions to reduce emissions and adapt to what’s coming.

By cleaning up industry, how electricity is made and how transport is powered, climate change can be dramatically reduced. Hausfather said when emissions stops, warming stops, “so we can stop this acceleration if we as a society get our act together.”

But some scientists said parts of the assessment are too optimistic.

“The report’s rosy graphics and outlook obscure the dangers approaching,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson said. “We are not prepared for what’s coming.”

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Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland, and Webber from Fenton, Michigan.

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment and follow Seth Borenstein and Tammy Webber on Twitter at http://twitter.com/borenbears and https://twitter.com/twebber02

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Onshore winds spreading south over the waters will reach 15 to 25 mph along the coast from Flagler Beach to Cape Canaveral, according to NWS Melbourne.

There are advisories for small craft in Volusia County and well offshore the Space Coast.

Surf zone conditions are choppy and there is a moderate risk of dangerous rip currents.

Temperatures will peak around 80 degrees in Orlando, 79 degrees in Sanford, 81 in Kissimmee and 84 in Okeechobee.

There will be a wide range of temperatures in the area today, NWS said. A few afternoon showers are expected south of Orlando and Cape Canaveral.

The high today will be 81 and the low will be 68 degrees.

The $416 million bill that emerged contains a hodgepodge of tax breaks, refunds, reimbursements, grants and loans for the agriculture, timber and shellfishing industries in a mostly rural, sparsely populated 17-county stretch of North Florida.

“This makes a huge difference in fiscally constrained counties that can’t tax their way or fund their way out of things that come in the normal course of a year,” said bill sponsor Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Port St. Joe.

But Democrats and environmentalists raised concerns about part of the bill that extends a ban on county and city governments from adopting moratoriums or restrictions on development for two years.

“This is a great bill,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, but she added the ban ties the hands of city and county officials trying to prevent building in areas vulnerable to flooding and wind damage from hurricanes.

Shoaf and Senate sponsor Corey Simon, R-Quincy, said the ban allows people to rebuild and get back to normal life faster without government interference.

Orange County officials supported the legislation because it reversed the original ban on restrictive development and zoning rules approved by the Legislature in regular session last spring. It pre-empted a much larger number of counties and cities located within 100 miles of landfall of hurricanes Ian and Hurricane Nicole in 2022 from proposing changes to their comprehensive plan or land development regulations before Oct. 1, 2024.

The new ban is limited to 10 southwest Florida counties affected only by Ian: Charlotte, Collier, Desoto, Glades, Hardee, Hendry, Highlands, Lee, Manatee, and Sarasota counties.

The law could put residents of those counties in danger, environmentalists said.

“This one section helps developers in Southwest Florida,” said David Cullen of the Sierra Club.  “Given recent events and rapid increase in hurricanes, I would be inclined to let counties and municipalities adopt stricter development rules. People died.”

Paul Owens of 1000 Friends of Florida said his organization also supports robust local planning. While he recognized the need for relief, he opposed the extension of the ban as “short-sighted.”

The state will suffer more frequent hurricanes with higher intensities, and local governments need to be able to pass measures to prevent development in the most vulnerable areas, he said.

Hurricane Idalia made landfall near Keaton Beach on Aug. 30 as a Category 3 hurricane with 125-mph winds and a 7- to 12-foot storm surge along 33 miles of coastline.

It caused an estimated $9.6 billion in insured losses as it tore through several counties before crossing into Georgia.

Agricultural losses in Florida from Hurricane Idalia will likely be between $78.8 million and $370.9 million, according to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Initial estimates put clamming industry losses at $34 million but business owners said it’s fast approaching $50 million.

The Legislature had already approved $1.4 billion in this year’s budget for hurricane preparation and recovery efforts. The Legislature added $416 million to those efforts in the special session.

The biggest piece of the new money – $181 million – targets measures to harden homes against future hurricanes is designed to clear a waiting list of 17,000 applicants for the My Safe Florida Home program. Applicants can get up to $10,000 for door, window and roofing upgrades.

As of October, the state had already approved $209 million for nearly 21,000 homeowners, with only about 12.9% of that disbursed, according to a Senate staff analysis of the bill.

The agricultural assistance approved comes out to $162.5 million for farms, timber growers and shellfishing operations.

About $75 million will create the Agriculture and Aquaculture Producers Natural Disaster Recovery Loan Program to provide long-term interest-free loans of up to $500,000 to repair or replace essential physical property and remove debris.

Another $37.5 million in grants of up to $250,000 will pay for up to 75% of the cost of site preparation and tree replanting. The bill also allocates $30 million to meet FEMA’s local match requirements for public assistance. And it provides $25 million in housing recovery loans to eligible counties.

Fifth-generation farmer Rob Land of Lafayette County said it would cost him a minimum of $200,000 to get back what he lost in the hurricane, including a $125,000 feed barn.

“It destroyed our cotton crops,” Land said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Timothy Solano, a board member of the Cedar Key Aquaculture Association, said the two weeks his clamming operation was out of commission cost his company $2 million, which will make it tough to fill his orders to suppliers.

The industry is on track to lose $50 million, he said, and federal funds won’t be available until March.

“This legislation is a good effort to provide the relief that we need,” Solano said.

The My Safe Florida Home program, which offers up to $10,000 to help Floridians harden their homes, is intended to strengthen buildings against hurricanes and help reduce sky-high homeowners insurance premiums.

But the state doesn’t know how effective the program is at curtailing insurance costs, and isn’t poised to find out. Florida lawmakers approved the funding without requesting any data collection or studies.

To longtime observers, the decision was another sign of the Legislature’s apparent unwillingness to study the state’s insurance crisis, which lawmakers in both parties say has become their top constituent issue. Lawmakers have not produced any studies about it. Their primary response has been to make it harder to sue insurance companies, but they produced no proof that lawsuits are the main driver behind rising premiums and failing companies.

In September, Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-Hollywood, told the state’s insurance commissioner that more information has been released on UFOs than Florida’s insurance industry. On Wednesday, Pizzo asked how the state was evaluating the My Safe Florida Home program.

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“How are we collecting data to gauge its efficacy?” Sen. Pizzo asked on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

“To be perfectly honest with you Sen. Pizzo, I’m not aware at the moment,” the bill sponsor, Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, responded.

Some homeowners see meaningful savings

Since launching last year, the My Safe Florida Home program has been popular. It pays for free home inspections and, if eligible, the state will pay $2 for every $1 the homeowner spends on upgrades, up to $10,000. Applicants who are deemed low-income can receive funds without having to make matching payments.

Insurers are required by state law to issue discounts for completed upgrades. The discounts take effect when the policy renews.

As of Oct. 6, the state had approved 79,119 inspections and 20,890 grants. The money allocated this week was for people who applied before Oct. 15 and had not yet gotten funding.

Early indications are that some recipients are saving money on their premiums. Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, who oversees the program, told lawmakers that the average homeowners insurance savings was just over $1,000, a figure that was repeated by some lawmakers this week.

That would be meaningful relief for many Floridians, where the statewide average annual premium is around $6,000, the highest in the nation, according to the industry-backed Insurance Information Institute.

But the $1,000 figure does not accurately reflect the average recipient’s experience.

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The figure is based on about 1,600 recipients who self-reported their savings to Patronis’ office, according to data given to the Times/Herald by the office. Their reported savings ranged from 7 cents to $31,644, for an average of $1,001.17 per year.

The median average — which neutralizes the effect of outliers in the data — shows a much more modest discount of $577.

Even $577 is not an accurate reflection of the homeowner’s experience, because it does not capture homeowners who saw no savings or saw their premiums go up.

In a briefing to a Senate committee last month, a Department of Financial Services official said that while 1,325 recipients saw their premiums go down, 644 saw no difference and 341 saw their rates go up. Another 101 recipients didn’t report any information.

“This doesn’t mean the program wasn’t helpful,” the department’s chief business officer, Steven Fielder, told senators. Premiums that went up might not have gone up as much without the program’s discounts, he said. The department doesn’t currently track that information.

The program is valuable in another crucial way, however: Homeowners could save thousands of dollars in repairs when a storm hits, said Mark Friedlander, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute.

It might not be the solution to reducing rates, which rose 42% on average this year, he said.

“A discount is good. That’s valuable to the homeowner,” he said. “But it does not make up for an average 102% cumulative premium increase over the last three years.”

Other states study programs

Several other coastal states have similar home-hardening programs and perform studies on the programs’ effects.

North Carolina launched a program in 2019 offering homeowners $6,000 to fortify their roofs. The state is partnering with multiple universities to analyze data the state is collecting on the program.

Since 2016, Alabama has offered homeowners $10,000 to fortify their homes, and the program has been studied by the University of Alabama.

Florida in 2009 hired consultants to study the effectiveness of a previous version of the My Safe Florida Home program. The study found that for every $1 invested in home-hardening, $1.50 in hurricane risk was reduced.

State lawmakers have not committed to continuing the program beyond this year, but leaders have voiced support.

“I believe in the program, I believe we should look at ways to expand it,” said House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast.

When asked why the state wasn’t collecting more data about the program, he said lawmakers could look for that in the regular legislative session, which begins in January.

Former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, has been frustrated by the lack of data and ideas to fix the property insurance crisis. He launched the Florida Policy Project, a think tank, this year to come up with best practice solutions to insurance and issues including housing and criminal justice reform.

The lack of good data on the home hardening program is emblematic of the larger problem with the Legislature’s approach to the crisis, he said.

“It highlights: What work was done over the summer on property insurance? And it seems to me, nothing,” he said.

Brandes questioned how useful the My Safe Florida Home program could really be, in part because the state could never afford to harden the millions of eligible homes in the state.

“There’s been no deep dive into whether it works or not,” Brandes said. “They don’t care. It’s just good politics.”

Miami Herald staff writer Alex Harris contributed to this report.

High pressure over the Atlantic waters plays a role in the higher-than-normal warmer temperatures over the next few days, according to NWS Melbourne.

Afternoon highs will be in the mid-80s, and the evening lows will be down into the 60s.

There could be some light showers over the local Atlantic waters. Otherwise, conditions will be mostly dry.

There is a moderate risk of dangerous rip currents at all Central Florida Atlantic beaches.

The last 12 months were the hottest Earth has ever recorded, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit science research group.

The peer-reviewed report says burning gasoline, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels that release planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide, and other human activities, caused the unnatural warming from November 2022 to October 2023.

Over the course of the year, 7.3 billion people, or 90% of humanity, endured at least 10 days of high temperatures that were made at least three times more likely because of climate change.

“People know that things are weird, but they don’t they don’t necessarily know why it’s weird. They don’t connect back to the fact that we’re still burning coal, oil and natural gas,” said Andrew Pershing, a climate scientist at Climate Central.

“I think the thing that really came screaming out of the data this year was nobody is safe. Everybody was experiencing unusual climate-driven heat at some point during the year,” said Pershing.

The average global temperature was 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial climate, which scientists say is close to the limit countries agreed not to go over in the Paris Agreement — a 1.5 C (2.7 F) rise. The impacts were apparent as one in four humans, or 1.9 billion people, suffered from dangerous heat waves.

At this point, said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University, no one should be caught off guard. “It’s like being on an escalator and being surprised that you’re going up,” he said. ”We know that things are getting warmer, this has been predicted for decades.”

Here’s how a few regions were affected by the extreme heat:

“We need to adapt, mitigate and be better prepared for the residual damages because impacts are highly uneven from place to place,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington, citing changes in precipitation, sea level rise, droughts, and wildfires.

The heat of the last year, intense as it was, is tempered because the oceans have been absorbing the majority of the excess heat related to climate change, but they are reaching their limit, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. “Oceans are really the thermostat of our planet … they are tied to our economy, food sources, and coastal infrastructure.”

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.