Rainy season

Cambridge Dictionary's general entry defines a rainy season as the time of year when a lot of rain falls in some tropical regions of the world. For Southwest Florida the dates come from the National Weather Service Tampa Bay Area office: May 15 to October 15, with a separate range, May 25 to October 10, for the rest of West Central Florida.

The office attaches its own hedge to both ranges: the season may occur before or after those dates, and its beginning is usually a transition period rather than a single date. Southwest Florida's rainy season is a name for a stretch of the calendar, not a switch that flips on May 15 and off on October 15.

NWS Miami, the local forecast office for Naples, gives the South Florida wet season the same dates, May 15 to October 15. NWS Miami ran a separate study of the summer season in southeast Florida, using Miami International Airport records from 1956 to 1997, and found a median start of May 21 and a median end of October 17. Those medians describe that airport, not Naples, and they come from a different method than NWS Tampa Bay's dates.

NWS Tampa Bay describes the season itself as warm and humid with frequent showers and thunderstorms, typically accompanied by persistent dew point values above 70 F, daily lows in the 70s to around 80 and highs in the upper 80s to middle 90s.

The office breaks the run into three phases: late May through June, when severe storms are most likely; July through early September, when the season peaks; and mid-September through early October, a wind-down phase with higher rainfall variability due to potential tropical systems and early-fall cold fronts. It traces the thunderstorm season to the tropical climate shifting north from June through September, combined with the surrounding oceans and daily sea breezes.

At Naples Municipal Airport, the four wettest months in NOAA's 1991 to 2020 precipitation normals are June, July, August and September, and all four fall inside NWS Tampa Bay's Southwest Florida dates. The twelve-month normals table on the seasons hub prints every month's figure for that station.

The rainy season is not a closed season for exterior work; it is the run of months when a dry stretch takes more waiting. ICPI's Tech Spec 5 asks for a completely dry surface before most sealers are applied, and these are the months that dry stretch is hardest to find. The dry season is the calendar's other half, and whether a job can simply be held until then is answered at whether exterior cleaning can wait until after the rainy season. Whether a roof can be cleaned inside these months is its own question at cleaning a roof during the rainy season.