Freeze probability of Florida in a regional climate model and climate indices

Severe freezes impacting agriculture in Florida were associated with some major climate patterns, such as El Nino and Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In this study, we examined whether seasonal ensemble integrations of a regional model could capture the tendencies of freezes in the Florida peninsula during each ENSO or NAO phase. Mean excess values of minimum temperatures from thresholds on the basis of the Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD), which represents the extreme data in a dataset, were used to analyze the freezes in the regional model. According to previous studies, El Nino winters are assumed to obtain fewer freezes than the other phases. Although ensembles of only 19 winters were simulated, the ensembles found similar variability patterns in minimum temperatures in each climate phase to the findings in the previous studies based on observed data.