Miami | Monday, August 17, 2026
South Florida remains locked in an extended and dangerous heat wave, with the National Weather Service issuing a heat advisory for Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties Monday as forecasters warned that afternoon heat index values could climb as high as 112 degrees — a level classified as a major heat-related health risk capable of producing heat illness, heat exhaustion, or heat stroke without proper hydration and cooling.
The advisory, in effect from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday, comes amid what meteorologists describe as an unusually persistent and dry heat wave stretching back to early August. Afternoon temperatures were forecast to peak in the mid-90s, with CBS News Miami meteorologists warning the region could approach or exceed Miami’s daily record high of 96 degrees, a mark itself only recently set — Miami broke a long-standing daily high temperature record dating back to 1909 just last Thursday, reaching 96 degrees. Fort Lauderdale’s forecast high of 95 degrees sits within range of that city’s 1924 record of 98 degrees, while Key West’s forecast high of 92 degrees compares to a 1951 record of 95 degrees — underscoring how close several individual station records came to falling in a single week.
Compounding the heat, a plume of Saharan dust moving across the region is producing hazy skies while keeping rain chances unusually low, with only a 10 percent chance of scattered showers Monday. That combination — intense heat paired with minimal rainfall — has kept the region “bone dry,” in the words of one local meteorologist, with drought conditions reported to be deteriorating in eastern portions of South Florida even as western areas see slight improvement, according to National Weather Service drought monitoring.
The heat is not expected to break immediately. The National Weather Service has designated Tuesday — which also happens to be Florida’s statewide primary election day — a “NEXT Weather Alert Day,” with forecasters warning that heat will actually intensify further as winds shift out of the west, pushing highs into the mid-to-upper 90s and heat index values into the range that will feel like triple digits for outdoor voters and poll workers alike. Relief is not forecast to arrive until midweek, when afternoon thunderstorms are expected to return by Wednesday, bringing highs back down into the low-to-mid 90s alongside a chance of rain.
The public health dimension of the story extends beyond individual discomfort. Miami-Dade and Broward counties use a locally calibrated heat advisory threshold — a heat index of 105 degrees or higher sustained for at least two hours — that is stricter than the national default criteria, a change first piloted in Miami-Dade in 2023 and expanded to Broward in 2024 after local health data showed significant heat-related health impacts occurring at lower heat index thresholds than the older national standard assumed. That local calibration reflects a broader, well-documented regional warming trend: average summertime maximum temperatures across Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties have risen at roughly 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over the past century, with the rate of warming accelerating to nearly a full degree per decade increase in overnight minimum temperatures over just the past 50 years, according to data compiled by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact.
For a region where outdoor labor, tourism, and now a statewide primary election all intersect with sustained extreme heat, Monday’s advisory is less an isolated weather event than another data point in a summer that has already produced multiple record-breaking days — a pattern regional climate officials say is consistent with a decades-long warming trajectory rather than an anomaly confined to this particular August.
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