Snow and Freezes in Tampa — Tampa, Florida

Snow has fallen on Tampa only a handful of times, and it has stayed on the ground in measurable amounts just twice. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Tampa has only recorded measurable snow twice in its meteorological history: a tenth of an inch in 1899 and two-tenths of an inch in 1977. Every other snow episode in the Tampa record has been flurries or a trace that melted on contact.

The 1899 snow arrived with the Great Arctic Outbreak of February 1899. The National Weather Service office in Birmingham describes how strong northerly winds pushed frigid air down the peninsula, with measurable snowfall reaching as far south as the Tampa area. That outbreak came only four years after the freezes of 1894 and 1895 had wrecked the citrus groves of Hillsborough County, so the cold of the 1890s left a deep mark on the young city.

Later snow came in lighter doses. Flurries were reported in Tampa during the Christmas storm of December 1989 and in parts of Tampa Bay during a long cold spell in January 2010, and on February 1, 2026, the National Weather Service filmed flurries outside its Tampa Bay office in Ruskin. None of those later episodes added to the count of measurable Tampa snowfalls, which still stands at two.

The snow that older Tampa residents still talk about fell before dawn on January 19, 1977. FOX 13 reported, citing the National Weather Service, that the snowfall came at the tail end of a strong Arctic cold front that moved rapidly down the state from late January 18 to early January 19. The weather service figures quoted by the station put the official Tampa total at 0.20 inches, while Plant City in eastern Hillsborough County recorded two inches. The same front carried snow as far south as Homestead and even onto Miami Beach.

According to WFLA, the snow started late the previous night and accumulated before sunrise under below-freezing temperatures, then melted away by mid-morning. In that short window the dusting shuttered schools, and utility companies worked to keep the power on as demand climbed. Untreated roads and drivers with no winter experience produced dozens of crashes around Tampa Bay before the thaw.

A 2020 FOX 13 anniversary report noted that some parts of the Tampa Bay area received half an inch, enough for snowmen and snowball fights, and that schools let children outside to see it. The station called 1977 the last measurable snowfall the city has experienced. When the Associated Press previewed a cold outbreak in January 2026, it still cited January 1977 as the regional record: 2 inches about 20 miles east of Tampa.

The coldest reading in Tampa came on December 13, 1962. Meteorologists at Spectrum Bay News 9 report that the temperature fell to 18 degrees at Tampa International Airport that morning, and that 18 degrees remains the coldest temperature ever recorded in the city's 130 years of record keeping. The low capped a three-day run of sub-freezing nights that began after an Arctic front swept through Tampa Bay on December 12 behind a strong north wind.

The cold had been building for days. Bay News 9 notes that Tampa Bay did not see a single 70-degree day during the week before the outbreak, and that on December 13 the afternoon high in Tampa reached only 44 degrees. Across the bay, downtown St. Petersburg fell to 22 degrees, its own all-time low, a reading that required air flowing almost entirely over land rather than across the warmer water of Tampa Bay. Then the pattern flipped: Tampa reached 80 degrees on Christmas Day 1962, its warmest day of that month.

In Hillsborough County the 1962 freeze is remembered mostly for citrus. Restored WTVT news film, aired by FOX 13 in November 2023, shows growers in the groves east of Tampa scrambling for heaters and burning diesel fuel through the nights of December 12 and 13. Some growers sprayed water to wrap trees in protective ice, and the weight of that ice split larger trees in half. Afterward, inspectors cut open oranges to judge what could still be packed fresh, and truck weight limits were lifted so frozen fruit could be rushed to juice plants. A citrus commission official told the Tampa station that the industry had lost considerably more fruit than in 1957. The forecasts growers relied on came from WTVT chief meteorologist Roy Leep.

The freezes of the 1890s struck a young Tampa. The City of Tampa Office of the City Clerk records that Robert W. Easley was elected the 29th mayor of Tampa on March 9, 1894, and that during his term the winter freeze of 1894 and 1895 destroyed about 70 percent of the citrus crop in Florida. Most of the citrus groves in Hillsborough County and surrounding areas were ruined, and Tampa property tax revenue declined in response.

The City Clerk biography adds that Mayor Easley and the Tampa City Council tried to provide some economic relief to citrus growers, but a substantially reduced City Treasury left little room to act. Easley, who had been business manager and co-owner of the Tampa Tribune and a developer of East Tampa, served a single term ending March 8, 1895.

A 2018 Sarasota Magazine survey of transformative Florida weather, which draws on USF St. Petersburg historian Gary R. Mormino, describes the season as two blows: an early freeze in December 1894 that was historic but not ruinous, then a more devastating freeze in February 1895 that pushed temperatures to 23 degrees in Manatee. The survey notes that the disaster encouraged the development of groves south of Tampa Bay, because groves planted near the water had escaped damage.

The NWS Tampa Bay Preserve America project, built with the University of South Florida around scanned Weather Bureau books dating back to 1890, lists the freezes it treats as landmark events for the region: 1835, 1886, 1894, 1901, 1905, 1918, 1934, 1957, 1962 and 1980.

The 1980s brought Florida no major hurricanes but four severe freezes, according to Sarasota Magazine, and those freezes devastated grove land north of Interstate 4, the corridor that runs east from Tampa toward Orlando, driving the citrus industry south to Hendry, DeSoto, Hardee and Collier counties. The freezes coincided with fast population growth, and many frozen groves east of Tampa Bay were bulldozed for housing tracts rather than replanted.

WFLA notes that after the 1977 snow came hard freezes in the 1980s and later flurries in inland areas that did not accumulate. The closest call arrived on December 23, 1989, when Tampa nearly saw a white Christmas during what the station describes as the largest snowstorm in history for the Southeast U.S. Measurable snow reached Jacksonville and Tallahassee, while Tampa and the Sarasota area saw flurries. The accompanying freeze cost Florida about 30 percent of a $1.4 billion citrus crop.

The National Weather Service station at Ruskin, the Hillsborough County home of the Tampa Bay forecast office, logged its earliest freeze that same season: 31 degrees on December 4, 1989, in a record that began in 1976, according to the office freeze tables.

Freezes remain part of winter around Tampa even when snow does not. The NWS Tampa Bay office states that freezing temperatures are possible into Central and South Florida during any winter, no matter the El Nino or La Nina phase. Its long-term averages show three to six days of freezing temperatures each winter across inland portions of Central Florida, compared with only about one freeze a winter over Southwest Florida, the two halves of the Tampa Bay office warning area.

The Tampa Bay office explains that the cause of a freeze tends to differ by pattern. In El Nino winters cold air is usually dragged south behind low pressure systems crossing the state, while La Nina freezes more often come from radiational cooling under clear skies and calm winds. The office adds that the phase of the Arctic Oscillation shapes the number of freezing days more than the ENSO phase does. Freezes rarely come early: in its table of earliest freezes, the Tampa station, with records beginning in 1890, shows 31 degrees on November 16, 1940.

The most recent outbreak came on the weekend of January 31 and February 1, 2026, the same weekend as the Gasparilla parade. The Tampa Bay Times reported that Tampa International Airport dropped to 30 degrees, a few degrees shy of the daily record, while Plant City in Hillsborough County recorded feels-like temperatures in the teens that left icicles hanging from oranges and strawberries. Forecasters described the overnight flurries as Gulf effect snow, which forms when much colder air passes over warmer water; Gulf temperatures sat in the upper 50s that weekend. The flurries lasted minutes and did not accumulate, leaving 1899 and 1977 as the only measurable Tampa snows.