Originally posted at 9:20 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018.

This week marks 20 years since the deadliest tornado outbreak in our state’s recorded history struck Central Florida.

During the summer months, afternoon rain, lightning and high wind is a daily occurrence in central Florida. Meanwhile, winter is often dry and pleasant. It’s why we call it “dry season.”

But history has proven that sunny days can end up becoming violent.

That’s exactly what happened on Feb. 22, 1998, when forecasters behind the doors of the National Weather Service in Melbourne were preparing for a particularly dangerous situation.

David Sharp was among the team at the NWS office in Melbourne at the time, issuing warnings for seven tornadoes that would touch down in the Melbourne county warning area. Two additional tornadoes touched down in the Tampa county warning area.

“We were looking at a setup we don't often get, but if we are going to get it, it’s going to be in February, and it’s going to be in an El Nino season, and indeed all of those things were in place," said Sharp.

So what made this event so destructive, one that would take 42 lives and destroy over 700 homes?

This situation was especially volatile because of several ingredients coming together at once. You had an approaching cold front and a strong low level jet out in advance of it out of the south. You had outflow boundaries from thunderstorms that occurred previously during the afternoon, and the key component was the strong subtropical jet stream, located more to the south over the Gulf of Mexico and Florida, which is typical of an El Nino winter.

Such seasonal patterns lead to supercell thunderstorms producing tornadoes.

“In an environment such as this,” Sharp adds, “not only do you have the capacity to produce rotating updrafts of supercell thunderstorms, but those thunderstorms which have the potential to produce killer tornadoes, it’s not a one and done kinda thing. They have the opportunity to not only produce it, but then in a cyclic nature, produce another, produce another, and that’s exactly what happened that night.”

These storms were racing across the peninsula at a rapid 45 mph.

"The storms were moving fast, very fast,” said Sharp. “So reaction time is cut down, and as a result, one of the things we did that night was go right to tornado warnings."

The severity prompted a rare level of urgency in their warning products.

"We used really emphatic terminology," explains Scott Spratt, Warning Coordination Meteorologist for the NWS in Melbourne. “We also used many exclamation points, that’s something you don’t see in National Weather Service products very often, especially in a tornado warning is exclamation points. So we were really trying to get out that this is an unusual event; its much stronger than the typical type of Florida tornado events that we get."

It was a shift both Scott and David will never forget.

"The anxiousness going into that night, the odd feeling in the pit of my stomach after the event, knowing that so many people were affected, lives and livelihoods too, the number of folks that lost their lives that night. It was not in vain. The advancements since that time have hopefully saved more lives than were lost that night,” recalled Sharp.

A look back of Florida's deadliest tornado