Texas Winter 2022-2023

[Cpv17]

The cold on the Euro is far enough west based that it would help with precip chances I would think as orangeblood mentioned.

Really interesting stuff. I am kind of kicking myself for not getting a generator after 2021. But, I felt surely I wouldn't need it again for a long time...

I think this could have greater potential for precipitation overall for the state than Feb 21 did.

[Texas Snow]

The cold on the Euro is far enough west based that it would help with precip chances I would think as orangeblood mentioned.

Really interesting stuff. I am kind of kicking myself for not getting a generator after 2021. But, I felt surely I wouldn't need it again for a long time...

You have time. The general public doesn't know much about this potential but when they do there will be a run on them. We only have one because my wife had a recurring dream a few years back that we needed one and its all she wanted for Mother's Day, so she got it. It has now helped others through 3 tornadoes, us on some random offsite projects, and of course four critical days in 2021. So worth it.

[orangeblood]

I've never seen such a massive area below zero in the USA. I'm going to start preps to my home this weekend if this keeps up .

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fj4abcMWQAEBM0W?format=png&name=medium

It's December 1983 ALL OVER AGAIN on the 12z Euro! It's a literal Arctic Cannon!

Winter people I disagree with would have trouble imagining a better pattern than that run. Not only extreme cold, but likely to have disturbances ride up out of the SWUS/northern Mexico.

Still too early to get hyped on details like that, but the trend is a winter lover’s friend right now

Re: Euro Op- There isn’t a much better map you could draw up for a Texas winter storm lingering for several days right before Christmas.

Although, Need caution with the Euro Op scenario depiction of a massive ULL in desert southwest like that. Having a 4 Standard Deviation ULL in that location is extremely rare. As Bastardi mentioned, the Euro loves to pool cold air over the Rockies. However, my counter to JB would be the 6 standard deviation HP dome over the Arctic, it would usually mean an extreme anomaly LP downstream just like the Euro is showing.

This pattern is ripe for the extreme

[Texas Snowman]

I’ve posted this before, might be worth a revisit since we’re hearing a lot about December 1983 right now…

—————

Effects, lessons of 1983 freeze evident on Texas ecosystem

By Shannon Tompkins | December 25, 2013 | Updated: December 25, 2013


(Photo caption) A sheath of frozen salt spray coats a vessel off Galveston on Christmas Day 1983 when the temperature fell to 14 degrees on the island. The days-long, record-setting freeze that gripped the Texas coast over Christmas week that year killed as many as 20 million inshore fish and triggered changes that continue impacting coastal fisheries management and recreational anglers three decades later.
Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle


Ed Hegen still shivers at the memory of the frigid morning 30 years ago this week when the Rockport-based coastal fisheries biologist boarded commercial fisherman Bucky Vannoy's skiff at Flour Bluff and they beat their way across miles of a leaden Upper Laguna Madre to Baffin Bay.

"I've never been so cold in my life," said Hegen, lower coast regional director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's coastal fisheries division, recalling his experiences that frozen day during the final week of 1983. "It was July before I thawed out."

Effects of the Christmas 1983 Freeze on Texas' coastal fisheries and fisheries management lasted much longer; some are still felt on this 30th anniversary of what stands as the longest, most severe stretch of sub-freezing cold to grip the Texas coast during the 20th century and the largest, scientifically documented, single-event fish kill that resulted.

"The '83 freeze played a big role in how we focused efforts on (coastal fisheries) monitoring, regulations and enhancement going forward. It changed the way we looked at things and how we planned," Gene McCarty, retired Texas Parks and Wildlife Department deputy director and former director of the agency's coastal fisheries division, said of the record-setting weather that saw air temperature along the coast fall into the teens and remain below freezing for five days to obliterate about 20 million coastal finfish and other marine life and leave fisheries managers and anglers facing daunting challenges.

It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.

It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.

"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."

The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast.

Drifts of dead fish

But the below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine.

"It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.

But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.

"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record."

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"The water was so clear - I've never seen it so clear - that you could see the bottom of the bay and all these shadows. It was trout carcasses; the bay bottom was covered with them," Hegen recalled.

It was the same on all Texas bays - dead fish by the millions.
Inshore fish and other marine organisms living in Texas bays evolved to live in the region's temperate, almost tropical environment. When water temperature drops below about 45 degrees and remains there for a day or so, fish such as speckled trout, redfish, black drum, sheepshead and all manner or smaller forage fish begin seeing their cold-blooded metabolisms slow to levels too low to keep them alive. They freeze to death.

Unprecedented issues

During the '83 freeze, water temperature in Texas bays dropped to as low as 28 degrees and remained below 40 degrees for seven consecutive days.

The freeze presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for a Texas coastal fisheries division that had only recently began transforming from a reactive, caretaker approach toward marine fisheries management to a proactive philosophy that used science and technology to monitor fisheries and develop long-term management decisions.

Part of that change had begun in the mid-1970s with development of standardized collection of data on fish populations and angler harvest in all Texas bays, giving fisheries managers ways to track trends in those fisheries.
And when the '83 freeze hit, Texas coastal fisheries staff mobilized to swarm the bays, systematically collecting as much information as they could on the effects.

"A lot of us worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for two weeks or more," Hegen said.

"I spent two weeks counting dead stuff," said Paul Hammerschmidt, regulations coordinator for TPWD's coastal fisheries division who, in 1983, was a young fisheries biologist stationed on mid-coast. "There was a lot to count. The magnitude and diversity of the kill is what really stuck with me."

The final estimate was at least 20 million marine creatures perished, including at least 14 million finfish.

Fisheries monitoring programs also provided insight into how many fish survived. It wasn't many.

In the spring of 1983, TPWD coastal fisheries crews conducting standardized, 10-week gill net sampling in the Lower Laguna Madre caught an average of 0.7 speckled trout per hour. In spring of 1984, the catch rate was 0.1 trout per hour. Fish sampling efforts in all Texas bays saw similar absences of trout and other inshore species.

Fast-tracking recovery

The agency's then-new creel surveys of recreational anglers substantiated what anglers already knew: Fishing success in 1984 was horrible. Hegen remembers it was so difficult to catch speckled trout in 1984 that the coastal fisheries division had to abandon a research project that placed tracking tags in speckled trout caught by rod-and-reel angling.

Facing the gaping hole the freeze left in Texas bays, state fisheries managers looked for ways to give fisheries the best opportunity to rebuild.

"One of the interesting outcomes of the freeze was how it transformed our hatchery program," McCarty said.

The first-of-its-kind John Wilson Marine Fish Hatchery had focused on research and modest production of redfish that were stocked only in mid-coast bays. The freeze kicked the hatchery program into hyperdrive, with redfish production greatly increased and fingerlings stocked into every Texas bay. Speckled trout were integrated into the hatchery program.

To protect remaining fish, the agency imposed much more conservative fishing regulations on commercial and recreational anglers. The speckled trout limit was halved from 20 fish per day to 10, and the minimum length increased from 12 inches to 14 inches. The redfish bag limit was cut from five per day to three.

It took two years before the fishery began showing significant signs of recovery. But it did recover … just in time to be slammed by a pair of killer freezes in 1989 that, combined, killed an estimated 17 million fish.

Recovery from the '89 freeze-caused fish kills came much quicker than in the wake of the '83 freeze, and fisheries managers credit lessons learned and refined after the '83 freeze for accelerating that recovery.

"The 1983 freeze was a real awakening for all of us on the coast," Hegen said. "It was a pivotal event for fisheries managers and fishermen."

[Brent]

The usually conservative Euro is snowing here at 240 hours with a temperature of 1... Fahrenheit I don't think it can be overstated enough how much potential this cold outbreak has

[Iceresistance]

It's December 1983 ALL OVER AGAIN on the 12z Euro! It's a literal Arctic Cannon!

Winter people I disagree with would have trouble imagining a better pattern than that run. Not only extreme cold, but likely to have disturbances ride up out of the SWUS/northern Mexico.

Still too early to get hyped on details like that, but the trend is a winter lover’s friend right now

Re: Euro Op- There isn’t a much better map you could draw up for a Texas winter storm lingering for several days right before Christmas.

Although, Need caution with the Euro Op scenario depiction of a massive ULL in desert southwest like that. Having a 4 Standard Deviation ULL in that location is extremely rare. As Bastardi mentioned, the Euro loves to pool cold air over the Rockies. However, my counter to JB would be the 6 standard deviation HP dome over the Arctic, it would usually mean an extreme anomaly LP downstream just like the Euro is showing.

This pattern is ripe for the extreme

https://images.weatherbell.com/model/ecmwf-deterministic/nhemi/z500_anom/1670932800/1671796800-Y3E78ymM2Ik.png

Oh my goodness, I knew that that this pattern had the potential to be extreme, but not like this!

[ThunderSleetDreams]

I’ve posted this before, might be worth a revisit since we’re hearing a lot about December 1983 right now…

—————

Effects, lessons of 1983 freeze evident on Texas ecosystem

By Shannon Tompkins | December 25, 2013 | Updated: December 25, 2013


(Photo caption) A sheath of frozen salt spray coats a vessel off Galveston on Christmas Day 1983 when the temperature fell to 14 degrees on the island. The days-long, record-setting freeze that gripped the Texas coast over Christmas week that year killed as many as 20 million inshore fish and triggered changes that continue impacting coastal fisheries management and recreational anglers three decades later.
Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle


Ed Hegen still shivers at the memory of the frigid morning 30 years ago this week when the Rockport-based coastal fisheries biologist boarded commercial fisherman Bucky Vannoy's skiff at Flour Bluff and they beat their way across miles of a leaden Upper Laguna Madre to Baffin Bay.

"I've never been so cold in my life," said Hegen, lower coast regional director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's coastal fisheries division, recalling his experiences that frozen day during the final week of 1983. "It was July before I thawed out."

Effects of the Christmas 1983 Freeze on Texas' coastal fisheries and fisheries management lasted much longer; some are still felt on this 30th anniversary of what stands as the longest, most severe stretch of sub-freezing cold to grip the Texas coast during the 20th century and the largest, scientifically documented, single-event fish kill that resulted.

"The '83 freeze played a big role in how we focused efforts on (coastal fisheries) monitoring, regulations and enhancement going forward. It changed the way we looked at things and how we planned," Gene McCarty, retired Texas Parks and Wildlife Department deputy director and former director of the agency's coastal fisheries division, said of the record-setting weather that saw air temperature along the coast fall into the teens and remain below freezing for five days to obliterate about 20 million coastal finfish and other marine life and leave fisheries managers and anglers facing daunting challenges.

It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.

It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.

"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."

The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast.

Drifts of dead fish

But the below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine.

"It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.

But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.

"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record."

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"The water was so clear - I've never seen it so clear - that you could see the bottom of the bay and all these shadows. It was trout carcasses; the bay bottom was covered with them," Hegen recalled.

It was the same on all Texas bays - dead fish by the millions.
Inshore fish and other marine organisms living in Texas bays evolved to live in the region's temperate, almost tropical environment. When water temperature drops below about 45 degrees and remains there for a day or so, fish such as speckled trout, redfish, black drum, sheepshead and all manner or smaller forage fish begin seeing their cold-blooded metabolisms slow to levels too low to keep them alive. They freeze to death.

Unprecedented issues

During the '83 freeze, water temperature in Texas bays dropped to as low as 28 degrees and remained below 40 degrees for seven consecutive days.

The freeze presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for a Texas coastal fisheries division that had only recently began transforming from a reactive, caretaker approach toward marine fisheries management to a proactive philosophy that used science and technology to monitor fisheries and develop long-term management decisions.

Part of that change had begun in the mid-1970s with development of standardized collection of data on fish populations and angler harvest in all Texas bays, giving fisheries managers ways to track trends in those fisheries.
And when the '83 freeze hit, Texas coastal fisheries staff mobilized to swarm the bays, systematically collecting as much information as they could on the effects.

"A lot of us worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for two weeks or more," Hegen said.

"I spent two weeks counting dead stuff," said Paul Hammerschmidt, regulations coordinator for TPWD's coastal fisheries division who, in 1983, was a young fisheries biologist stationed on mid-coast. "There was a lot to count. The magnitude and diversity of the kill is what really stuck with me."

The final estimate was at least 20 million marine creatures perished, including at least 14 million finfish.

Fisheries monitoring programs also provided insight into how many fish survived. It wasn't many.

In the spring of 1983, TPWD coastal fisheries crews conducting standardized, 10-week gill net sampling in the Lower Laguna Madre caught an average of 0.7 speckled trout per hour. In spring of 1984, the catch rate was 0.1 trout per hour. Fish sampling efforts in all Texas bays saw similar absences of trout and other inshore species.

Fast-tracking recovery

The agency's then-new creel surveys of recreational anglers substantiated what anglers already knew: Fishing success in 1984 was horrible. Hegen remembers it was so difficult to catch speckled trout in 1984 that the coastal fisheries division had to abandon a research project that placed tracking tags in speckled trout caught by rod-and-reel angling.

Facing the gaping hole the freeze left in Texas bays, state fisheries managers looked for ways to give fisheries the best opportunity to rebuild.

"One of the interesting outcomes of the freeze was how it transformed our hatchery program," McCarty said.

The first-of-its-kind John Wilson Marine Fish Hatchery had focused on research and modest production of redfish that were stocked only in mid-coast bays. The freeze kicked the hatchery program into hyperdrive, with redfish production greatly increased and fingerlings stocked into every Texas bay. Speckled trout were integrated into the hatchery program.

To protect remaining fish, the agency imposed much more conservative fishing regulations on commercial and recreational anglers. The speckled trout limit was halved from 20 fish per day to 10, and the minimum length increased from 12 inches to 14 inches. The redfish bag limit was cut from five per day to three.

It took two years before the fishery began showing significant signs of recovery. But it did recover … just in time to be slammed by a pair of killer freezes in 1989 that, combined, killed an estimated 17 million fish.

Recovery from the '89 freeze-caused fish kills came much quicker than in the wake of the '83 freeze, and fisheries managers credit lessons learned and refined after the '83 freeze for accelerating that recovery.

"The 1983 freeze was a real awakening for all of us on the coast," Hegen said. "It was a pivotal event for fisheries managers and fishermen."

I think I’ve read that article 20 times in my adult life

[Tireman4]

---

Yep, I was a senior in high school in Santa Fe ( 17 miles north of Galveston). Pipes froze. Did not lose electricity, though. Fun times. Lol

[rwfromkansas]

The cold on the Euro is far enough west based that it would help with precip chances I would think as orangeblood mentioned.

Really interesting stuff. I am kind of kicking myself for not getting a generator after 2021. But, I felt surely I wouldn't need it again for a long time...

You have time. The general public doesn't know much about this potential but when they do there will be a run on them. We only have one because my wife had a recurring dream a few years back that we needed one and its all she wanted for Mother's Day, so she got it. It has now helped others through 3 tornadoes, us on some random offsite projects, and of course four critical days in 2021. So worth it.

Did you get a switch so it could truly power the house?

[Texas Snowman]

I’ve posted this before, might be worth a revisit since we’re hearing a lot about December 1983 right now…

—————

Effects, lessons of 1983 freeze evident on Texas ecosystem

By Shannon Tompkins | December 25, 2013 | Updated: December 25, 2013


(Photo caption) A sheath of frozen salt spray coats a vessel off Galveston on Christmas Day 1983 when the temperature fell to 14 degrees on the island. The days-long, record-setting freeze that gripped the Texas coast over Christmas week that year killed as many as 20 million inshore fish and triggered changes that continue impacting coastal fisheries management and recreational anglers three decades later.
Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle


Ed Hegen still shivers at the memory of the frigid morning 30 years ago this week when the Rockport-based coastal fisheries biologist boarded commercial fisherman Bucky Vannoy's skiff at Flour Bluff and they beat their way across miles of a leaden Upper Laguna Madre to Baffin Bay.

"I've never been so cold in my life," said Hegen, lower coast regional director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's coastal fisheries division, recalling his experiences that frozen day during the final week of 1983. "It was July before I thawed out."

Effects of the Christmas 1983 Freeze on Texas' coastal fisheries and fisheries management lasted much longer; some are still felt on this 30th anniversary of what stands as the longest, most severe stretch of sub-freezing cold to grip the Texas coast during the 20th century and the largest, scientifically documented, single-event fish kill that resulted.

"The '83 freeze played a big role in how we focused efforts on (coastal fisheries) monitoring, regulations and enhancement going forward. It changed the way we looked at things and how we planned," Gene McCarty, retired Texas Parks and Wildlife Department deputy director and former director of the agency's coastal fisheries division, said of the record-setting weather that saw air temperature along the coast fall into the teens and remain below freezing for five days to obliterate about 20 million coastal finfish and other marine life and leave fisheries managers and anglers facing daunting challenges.

It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.

It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.

"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."

The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast.

Drifts of dead fish

But the below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine.

"It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.

But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.

"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record."

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"The water was so clear - I've never seen it so clear - that you could see the bottom of the bay and all these shadows. It was trout carcasses; the bay bottom was covered with them," Hegen recalled.

It was the same on all Texas bays - dead fish by the millions.
Inshore fish and other marine organisms living in Texas bays evolved to live in the region's temperate, almost tropical environment. When water temperature drops below about 45 degrees and remains there for a day or so, fish such as speckled trout, redfish, black drum, sheepshead and all manner or smaller forage fish begin seeing their cold-blooded metabolisms slow to levels too low to keep them alive. They freeze to death.

Unprecedented issues

During the '83 freeze, water temperature in Texas bays dropped to as low as 28 degrees and remained below 40 degrees for seven consecutive days.

The freeze presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for a Texas coastal fisheries division that had only recently began transforming from a reactive, caretaker approach toward marine fisheries management to a proactive philosophy that used science and technology to monitor fisheries and develop long-term management decisions.

Part of that change had begun in the mid-1970s with development of standardized collection of data on fish populations and angler harvest in all Texas bays, giving fisheries managers ways to track trends in those fisheries.
And when the '83 freeze hit, Texas coastal fisheries staff mobilized to swarm the bays, systematically collecting as much information as they could on the effects.

"A lot of us worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for two weeks or more," Hegen said.

"I spent two weeks counting dead stuff," said Paul Hammerschmidt, regulations coordinator for TPWD's coastal fisheries division who, in 1983, was a young fisheries biologist stationed on mid-coast. "There was a lot to count. The magnitude and diversity of the kill is what really stuck with me."

The final estimate was at least 20 million marine creatures perished, including at least 14 million finfish.

Fisheries monitoring programs also provided insight into how many fish survived. It wasn't many.

In the spring of 1983, TPWD coastal fisheries crews conducting standardized, 10-week gill net sampling in the Lower Laguna Madre caught an average of 0.7 speckled trout per hour. In spring of 1984, the catch rate was 0.1 trout per hour. Fish sampling efforts in all Texas bays saw similar absences of trout and other inshore species.

Fast-tracking recovery

The agency's then-new creel surveys of recreational anglers substantiated what anglers already knew: Fishing success in 1984 was horrible. Hegen remembers it was so difficult to catch speckled trout in 1984 that the coastal fisheries division had to abandon a research project that placed tracking tags in speckled trout caught by rod-and-reel angling.

Facing the gaping hole the freeze left in Texas bays, state fisheries managers looked for ways to give fisheries the best opportunity to rebuild.

"One of the interesting outcomes of the freeze was how it transformed our hatchery program," McCarty said.

The first-of-its-kind John Wilson Marine Fish Hatchery had focused on research and modest production of redfish that were stocked only in mid-coast bays. The freeze kicked the hatchery program into hyperdrive, with redfish production greatly increased and fingerlings stocked into every Texas bay. Speckled trout were integrated into the hatchery program.

To protect remaining fish, the agency imposed much more conservative fishing regulations on commercial and recreational anglers. The speckled trout limit was halved from 20 fish per day to 10, and the minimum length increased from 12 inches to 14 inches. The redfish bag limit was cut from five per day to three.

It took two years before the fishery began showing significant signs of recovery. But it did recover … just in time to be slammed by a pair of killer freezes in 1989 that, combined, killed an estimated 17 million fish.

Recovery from the '89 freeze-caused fish kills came much quicker than in the wake of the '83 freeze, and fisheries managers credit lessons learned and refined after the '83 freeze for accelerating that recovery.

"The 1983 freeze was a real awakening for all of us on the coast," Hegen said. "It was a pivotal event for fisheries managers and fishermen."

I think I’ve read that article 20 times in my adult life

I’ve posted it here several times because while I lived it out, to many others here, December 1983 is just some historical time they occasionally hear about.

Like February 2021, it was about as extreme a winter weather event as you could ever expect to see across Texas. And at Christmas time…

[UTSARoadrunner4]

I would have faith in ERCOT and the Texas power grid, but ERCOT was putting out grid warnings for about 4 days during the summer.

[ThunderSleetDreams]

I’ve posted this before, might be worth a revisit since we’re hearing a lot about December 1983 right now…

—————

Effects, lessons of 1983 freeze evident on Texas ecosystem

By Shannon Tompkins | December 25, 2013 | Updated: December 25, 2013


(Photo caption) A sheath of frozen salt spray coats a vessel off Galveston on Christmas Day 1983 when the temperature fell to 14 degrees on the island. The days-long, record-setting freeze that gripped the Texas coast over Christmas week that year killed as many as 20 million inshore fish and triggered changes that continue impacting coastal fisheries management and recreational anglers three decades later.
Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle


Ed Hegen still shivers at the memory of the frigid morning 30 years ago this week when the Rockport-based coastal fisheries biologist boarded commercial fisherman Bucky Vannoy's skiff at Flour Bluff and they beat their way across miles of a leaden Upper Laguna Madre to Baffin Bay.

"I've never been so cold in my life," said Hegen, lower coast regional director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's coastal fisheries division, recalling his experiences that frozen day during the final week of 1983. "It was July before I thawed out."

Effects of the Christmas 1983 Freeze on Texas' coastal fisheries and fisheries management lasted much longer; some are still felt on this 30th anniversary of what stands as the longest, most severe stretch of sub-freezing cold to grip the Texas coast during the 20th century and the largest, scientifically documented, single-event fish kill that resulted.

"The '83 freeze played a big role in how we focused efforts on (coastal fisheries) monitoring, regulations and enhancement going forward. It changed the way we looked at things and how we planned," Gene McCarty, retired Texas Parks and Wildlife Department deputy director and former director of the agency's coastal fisheries division, said of the record-setting weather that saw air temperature along the coast fall into the teens and remain below freezing for five days to obliterate about 20 million coastal finfish and other marine life and leave fisheries managers and anglers facing daunting challenges.

It began when a pool of Arctic air pushed over the Texas coast the afternoon of Dec. 21, plunging air temperature from the 50s to the 30s in little more than an hour. In Houston, the temperature dropped below freezing the next afternoon and remained there for five days, setting a record for longest period of below-freezing temperatures in the city. Houston's temperature fell below freezing for 10 consecutive nights, bottoming out at 13 degrees on Christmas morning.

It was equally frigid on the coast - 15 degrees in Palacios, 14 degrees in Galveston and Corpus Christi, 19 degrees in McAllen. Air temperature remained below freezing for 77 hours in Port Arthur. Saltwater froze; on Trinity Bay, a sheet of ice 4 inches thick extended almost 500 yards from shore, and a similarly thick layer created a 100-yard band around the edges of the Upper Laguna Madre.

"You couldn't get a boat out in the bay for the first few days because the ice was so thick," recalled Lynn Benefield, who, in 1983, headed coastal fisheries' Galveston Bay field station. "When we finally did get out, the thing that sticks in my mind is seeing the back half of East (Galveston) Bay covered in slush ice from shore to shore. I'll never forget that."

The bitter, lingering cold was unlike anything Hegen, McCarty, Benefield or anyone else had experienced on the Texas coast, where freezes, while not uncommon, are typically short-lived. The most severe cold weather before the '83 freeze had been in January 1951, and it had been almost a century - February 1899 - since Texas had seen such deep, abiding cold along the coast.

Drifts of dead fish

But the below-freezing air temperature wasn't the only thing that chilled Hegen on his recognizance on the Upper Laguna Madre. What he witnessed as he and Vannoy explored the shallow bay system with the earned reputation as home of the best-quality speckled trout fisheries in the state sent shudders down his spine.

"It looked like snow drifts along the shorelines - big piles of white, 15-20 yards wide," Hegen said.

But it wasn't snow; it was ice … and dead fish. Thousands of dead fish.

"There were long windrows of dead fish - every kind of fish - stacked like cordwood," Hegen said. "The number and the size of the sow speckled trout we saw made your jaw just drop. There were thousands of them, dead on the shoreline. Huge trout, some I guessed were bigger than the state record."

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"The water was so clear - I've never seen it so clear - that you could see the bottom of the bay and all these shadows. It was trout carcasses; the bay bottom was covered with them," Hegen recalled.

It was the same on all Texas bays - dead fish by the millions.
Inshore fish and other marine organisms living in Texas bays evolved to live in the region's temperate, almost tropical environment. When water temperature drops below about 45 degrees and remains there for a day or so, fish such as speckled trout, redfish, black drum, sheepshead and all manner or smaller forage fish begin seeing their cold-blooded metabolisms slow to levels too low to keep them alive. They freeze to death.

Unprecedented issues

During the '83 freeze, water temperature in Texas bays dropped to as low as 28 degrees and remained below 40 degrees for seven consecutive days.

The freeze presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for a Texas coastal fisheries division that had only recently began transforming from a reactive, caretaker approach toward marine fisheries management to a proactive philosophy that used science and technology to monitor fisheries and develop long-term management decisions.

Part of that change had begun in the mid-1970s with development of standardized collection of data on fish populations and angler harvest in all Texas bays, giving fisheries managers ways to track trends in those fisheries.
And when the '83 freeze hit, Texas coastal fisheries staff mobilized to swarm the bays, systematically collecting as much information as they could on the effects.

"A lot of us worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for two weeks or more," Hegen said.

"I spent two weeks counting dead stuff," said Paul Hammerschmidt, regulations coordinator for TPWD's coastal fisheries division who, in 1983, was a young fisheries biologist stationed on mid-coast. "There was a lot to count. The magnitude and diversity of the kill is what really stuck with me."

The final estimate was at least 20 million marine creatures perished, including at least 14 million finfish.

Fisheries monitoring programs also provided insight into how many fish survived. It wasn't many.

In the spring of 1983, TPWD coastal fisheries crews conducting standardized, 10-week gill net sampling in the Lower Laguna Madre caught an average of 0.7 speckled trout per hour. In spring of 1984, the catch rate was 0.1 trout per hour. Fish sampling efforts in all Texas bays saw similar absences of trout and other inshore species.

Fast-tracking recovery

The agency's then-new creel surveys of recreational anglers substantiated what anglers already knew: Fishing success in 1984 was horrible. Hegen remembers it was so difficult to catch speckled trout in 1984 that the coastal fisheries division had to abandon a research project that placed tracking tags in speckled trout caught by rod-and-reel angling.

Facing the gaping hole the freeze left in Texas bays, state fisheries managers looked for ways to give fisheries the best opportunity to rebuild.

"One of the interesting outcomes of the freeze was how it transformed our hatchery program," McCarty said.

The first-of-its-kind John Wilson Marine Fish Hatchery had focused on research and modest production of redfish that were stocked only in mid-coast bays. The freeze kicked the hatchery program into hyperdrive, with redfish production greatly increased and fingerlings stocked into every Texas bay. Speckled trout were integrated into the hatchery program.

To protect remaining fish, the agency imposed much more conservative fishing regulations on commercial and recreational anglers. The speckled trout limit was halved from 20 fish per day to 10, and the minimum length increased from 12 inches to 14 inches. The redfish bag limit was cut from five per day to three.

It took two years before the fishery began showing significant signs of recovery. But it did recover … just in time to be slammed by a pair of killer freezes in 1989 that, combined, killed an estimated 17 million fish.

Recovery from the '89 freeze-caused fish kills came much quicker than in the wake of the '83 freeze, and fisheries managers credit lessons learned and refined after the '83 freeze for accelerating that recovery.

"The 1983 freeze was a real awakening for all of us on the coast," Hegen said. "It was a pivotal event for fisheries managers and fishermen."

I think I’ve read that article 20 times in my adult life

I’ve posted it here several times because while I lived it out, to many others here, December 1983 is just some historical time they occasionally hear about.

Like February 2021, it was about as extreme a winter weather event as you could ever expect to see across Texas. And at Christmas time…

I was 18 months in the 1983 cold. Wish I could have remembered it. I remember 1989 very vividly.

[ThunderSleetDreams]

I would have faith in ERCOT and the Texas power grid, but ERCOT was putting out grid warnings for about 4 days during the summer.

Summer warnings and Winter warnings are very different.

If anyone wants a crash course on why I’m not worried about ERCOT, feel free to PM.

[Cerlin]

My jaw dropped when I saw the Euro. Is this the same Euro that didn’t want the February 2021 outbreak? I’ll never forget stepping outside my apartment in Norman in my bare feet to experience the -14 degree temperatures. I’m poised for a rerun! I might drive to and from Texas a few times over the next month just to make sure I’m getting the extreme winter weather if this verifies.

[Ntxw]

My jaw dropped when I saw the Euro. Is this the same Euro that didn’t want the February 2021 outbreak? I’ll never forget stepping outside my apartment in Norman in my bare feet to experience the -14 degree temperatures. I’m poised for a rerun! I might drive to and from Texas a few times over the next month just to make sure I’m getting the extreme winter weather if this verifies.

Yeah from start to finish the Euro was mehhh for 2021. So you know the potential of this is eye popping.

[Cpv17]

Will this be about the time the operationals start to trend warmer? Be consistent with it? Or start coming in even stronger?

[Iceresistance]

Will this be about the time the operationals start to trend warmer? Be consistent with it? Or start coming in even stronger?

We've may have already past the point on trending warmer unless the Arctic HPs trend weaker.

[Iceresistance]

Remember that I said that the craziest models would try to go for 1080 mb Arctic HP? Well, the 12z JMA did just that.


https://s9.gifyu.com/images/jma_z500_mslp_namer_9.png

[Cpv17]

Will this be about the time the operationals start to trend warmer? Be consistent with it? Or start coming in even stronger?

We've may have already past the point on trending warmer unless the Arctic HPs trend weaker.

I kind of agree. With the potential 1070 MB highs being projected, I’d say it could come in colder.

[Cpv17]

Remember that I said that the craziest models would try to go for 1080 mb Arctic HP? Well, the 12z JMA did just that.

https://s9.gifyu.com/images/jma_z500_mslp_namer_9.png
https://s9.gifyu.com/images/jma_z500_mslp_namer_9.png

Look at that flow pattern lol that’s just silly!