Texas Winter 2020-2021

[Iceresistance]

12z Euro has widspread snow across the Southern Plains

OKC, DFW & Austin would have 2-4 inches of snow with Heavier amounts in Bands.

[cctxhurricanewatcher]

This is 1983 and 1989 like stuff for South Texas. I hope our local NWS in Corpus and San Antonio are taking note because their overnight AFD were kind of showing some passing concern. They should be treating this like a storm in Caribbean with eyes for the Western Gulf right now.

Yeah, I was here for the '83 and '89 storms in San Antonio. In the '89 freeze, it got down to 9 degrees (I think, maybe 6 degrees(?)). That freeze killed my dad's entire Ligustrum hedge of six bushes, which he had planted 14 years prior to that freeze. They were at least 6 to 8 feet tall! All turned brown within a couple days afterward. It was shocking.

I was a kid growing up in the RGV during that time. It got down into the teens in both 83 and 89. What didn’t get killed in the citrus groves and palms in 83 got taken care of in 1989. My mom had a whole bunch of tropical plants and cactus that was whipped out in 83. And an large avocado tree too.

[orangeblood]

Euro gets there with the cold and snow like the other models. It's timing is still slower compared to them (but still faster than prior) and the trend on it is a good one.

So at this point an aggregate of the models is sometime this weekend to V day there is a potential for some kind of significant snow storm to accompany the cold. Timing is uncertain and which disturbance.

And it's not often we need to begin analyzing higher snow ratios in this kind of environment....Euro has over .30 inch qpf early next week, that's likely 4-6 inches of snow

These snowfall maps are mostly in 10:1 mode, underestimating these totals!!

[cctxhurricanewatcher]

And I forgot to add I was kind of a weather geek back then and had a RadioShack weather radio. And those Mets at the Brownsville NWS were issuing “bear watches” two weeks before the bottom fell out . They were the best a pattern recognition.

[wxman22]

12Z Euro with a winter storm now. Im loving the trends

[Iceresistance]

31°F right now, Freezing Mist outside.
27°F in OKC.

[Iceresistance]

KFOR is holding off Arctic air, but it's already here!

[Iceresistance]

How is the CMC Ensembles looking?

[gpsnowman]

And I forgot to add I was kind of a weather geek back then and had a RadioShack weather radio. And those Mets at the Brownsville NWS were issuing “bear watches” two weeks before the bottom fell out . They were the best a pattern recognition.

Great story!! My father took me to RadioShack in 1984 to get a weather radio. And boy I listened to that thing every night for years listening to weather conditions around Texas. I wore that radio out.

[WinterMax]

I'm just south of Alexandria La. Looks to me like the Euro run is not too bad here for us, gets cold, but warms up pretty quickly. And no winter storm. I'll take that.

[Stormcenter]

And of course that will change because it’s
the EURO.

I'm just south of Alexandria La. Looks to me like the Euro run is not too bad here for us, gets cold, but warms up pretty quickly. And no winter storm. I'll take that.

[Texas Snowman]

I’ve posted these stories previously, but here’s a little refresher course on the 1983 freeze. Some good detail from Shannon Tompkins, the longtime and now retired outdoor writer with the Houston Chronicle. Interesting perspective here. Two more stories to follow:

————-

Christmas 1983 freeze left heavy mark on Texas coastal fisheries

By SHANNON TOMPKINS Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
Dec. 24, 2003, 8:21PM

AUTUMN'S official final day in 1983 became the unofficial first day of a new reality for Texas coastal fisheries resources, the people who manage them and the Texans who enjoy them.

Events that began that day, 20 years ago this week, accelerated changes in Texas coastal fisheries management philosophy, forced anglers to accept the fragility of coastal resources and left wounds in the inshore fishery that may never heal.

"It changed everything," Gene McCarty, former director of coastal fisheries for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and current chief of staff for the agency, said of what has become known as the Christmas '83 Freeze.

Dec. 21, 1983, dawned seasonably mild with a light, humid southeast wind blowing from the Gulf.

That afternoon, an arctic cold front of epic strength rushed south over Texas, bringing screaming north wind, sleet and dropping temperatures.

Temperature slipped below freezing in Houston the afternoon of Dec. 22, and did not rise above that mark for five days -- a record that still stands.

The Texas coast was locked in one of the most severe, persistent freezes in more than a century.

Christmas morning, Houston recorded a low of 11 degrees. Galveston registered 14 degrees. It was 6 below zero in Dallas, and 13 in Del Rio.

"It was 15 degrees in Palacios," said Paul Hammerschmidt, who in 1983 was a TPWD coastal fisheries biologist based in Port O'Connor. "It was warmer in Anchorage, Alaska."

Another brutal arctic cold front just before New Year's Day reinforced the cold, and kept temperatures below or near freezing for several more days.

"I remember getting in a net skiff with a commercial fisherman in Flour Bluff (near Corpus Christi) on Jan. 2 and going down to Baffin Bay," said Ed Hegen, then a
TPWD coastal fisheries biologist working out of Rockport.
"It was unbelievably cold. I don't think I've thawed out since then."

What Hegen, now Lower Texas Coast regional director for TPWD's coastal fisheries division, saw in Baffin Bay that day mirrored what other TPWD coastal fisheries staff witnessed when they went afield to survey the bays.

"There were windrows of dead fish everywhere," Hegen recalled. "They were stacked for yards along the shorelines. Spotted seatrout, redfish, drum -- every species in the bay."

The shallow bay was clear as glass, Hegen said. Visible on the bay floor was a carpet of dead fish at least equal to the numbers stacked against the windward shores and floating in sheets on the surface.

Texas inshore marine fisheries had been caught in a frigid, fatal trap. Evolved for life in a temperate, even tropical environment, Texas marine life is not built to endure severe cold. Caught in water about 45 degrees or lower for more than a day, they die. Death can come from suffocation -- the metabolism of the cold-blooded fish slows to the point they can't extract oxygen from the water. Or they can suffer frostbite, having the flesh of fins, tails and other extremities literally frozen.

"The severity and duration of the '83 freeze were what made it so deadly," said Hammerschmidt, now program director of regulations for TPWD's coastal fisheries division.

Fisheries biologists knew fish were dying, but they couldn't get on the water to assess the impact until the worst of the weather had passed.

"The bays literally froze over," Hammerschmidt said. "We couldn't get boats in the water."

"There was ice 4 inches thick for 100 yards off the shore (of the Upper Laguna Madre)," Hegen remembers. "We had to wait until it began breaking up to get on the water."

TPWD scrambled coastal fisheries staff to begin assessing the freeze's impact, surveying the bays from boats, on foot and from the air.

It was worse than they could imagine.

The first place Hammerschmidt inspected was the shallows of the San Antonio and Espiritu Santo bays.

"I went into Shoalwater Bay and it was covered with dead fish -- redfish stacked in heaps like cordwood."

The beach of Matagorda Island was littered with carcasses of adult redfish and the occasional sea turtle.

Texas bays have always seen occasional freeze-triggered fish kills. But almost all during the 20th Century had been relatively minor or affected only portions of the Texas coast.

The Christmas '83 Freeze was different. It hammered the entire Texas coast, from Sabine Pass to Port Isabel.
TPWD coastal fisheries biologists began counting dead fish, using sampling techniques they had developed as part of standardized fish population research the agency had begun in 1975. At the time it was the most avant-garde fisheries work in the nation.

The tally was breathtaking. TPWD estimated the freeze killed more than 20 million coastal finfish. The number of invertebrate marine life -- shrimp, crab, etc. -- lost was estimated at more than one-billion organisms.

Not since 1952 had Texas seen such a widespread and devastating freeze-caused fish kill.

In 1952, Texas fisheries managers could do little to address the effects of such a crippling blow to coastal fisheries. Coastal fisheries were relatively lightly utilized and the Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission (precursor to TPWD) was hamstrung by political realities of the day.

But 1983 was different.

Earlier that year, the Texas Legislature had passed the Uniform Wildlife Regulatory Act, a watershed piece of legislation that gave TPWD authority to set statewide fishing and hunting regulations.

(Prior to the law, counties could, and often did, set their own hunting and fishing regulations, even if in direct conflict with state regulations, blunting scientific management efforts.)

Also, improved science, a move toward proactive management of fisheries and a public becoming increasingly aware of pressure on coastal resources set the stage for what happened in the wake of the '83 freeze.

Almost immediately, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission moved to impose more conservative recreational and commercial fishing regulations.
Fisheries needed the protection.

Anglers needed no convincing of that. The bays were empty.

But TPWD used its sampling protocols to document the massive hole the freeze left in coastal fisheries.

"The freeze proved the value of our long-term monitoring programs," Hammerschmidt said. "We could document the state of the fisheries to justify management moves and track their effectiveness."

"That freeze was the thing that shaped our coastal fisheries management philosophy, and turned the focus on conservation," said Gene McCarty. "We began looking at the long-term, and being proactive instead of reactive. It was the direction we were heading, but the freeze accelerated things."

When the freeze hit, McCarty was working at the just-opened John Wilson Fish Hatchery near Corpus Christi, the first hatchery in the nation devoted to producing inshore marine fish for stocking into coastal waters.

The hatchery's focus was on redfish, a species that even before the freeze had been decimated by overfishing.

"Prior to the freeze, we were in the research and assessment mode, just getting our feet on the ground and stocking fish only in San Antonio and Espiritu Santo bays," McCarty said. "After the freeze, we immediately went statewide, stocking redfish in every bay on the coast."

"The freeze kicked our hatchery program into high gear," Hegen said. "We had been initially working just with redfish, but we started doing the first really serious research into raising trout because of the freeze."

Coastal fishing was horrible in 1984 and into '85. But the trout and redfish fisheries slowly improved, statewide.

Then, in 1989, two killer freezes -- in February and another at Christmas -- killed millions more coastal fish.

But the damage from those freezes totaled about half the casualties of the '83 freeze. TPWD imposed slightly tighter fishing regulations, worked on habitat and stocking. It helped that, in 1988, all netting had been banned from coastal waters, a move justified by TPWD's monitoring.

The coastal fishery recovered from those '89 freezes much quicker than in '83.

"That faster recovery is directly related to lessons we learned from the '83 freeze," Hammerschmidt said.

Shannon Tompkins covers outdoor recreation for the Chronicle. His column appears Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.

[Texas Snowman]

Second of three stories:

http://www.chron.com/sports/outdoors/ar ... 092926.php

Effects, lessons of 1983 freeze evident on Texas ecosystem

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

Photo Cutline: 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."

[Texas Snowman]

Third of three stories:

Tompkins: Documenting Texas coast's big chills

SHANNON TOMPKINS, Copyright 2011 Houston Chronicle

Published 6:30 am, Thursday, February 10, 2011

Fish-killing freezes aren’t particularly unusual events along the Texas coast; dozens of cold-related kills have been documented over the state’s history.

But, as appears the case with this past week’s cold spell, most of the freeze-related fish kills have been relatively minor — glancing blows instead of knockout punches.

A handful of freezes, though, have resulted in catastrophic loss of marine life, killing millions of inshore fish and other marine organisms and leaving behind a devastated fishery that takes years to recover.

A review of historical records over the past 150 or so years indicates a ruinous freeze — one resulting in mass kills of marine life — occurs, on average, about every 15 years.

In that regard, Texas has been riding a lucky streak; the most recent major, coast wide, freeze-triggered fish kill occurred a little more than 21 years ago.

Here’s a brief history of some of the historically important and major freeze-related fish kills on the Texas coast:

1528 — The first European to note freeze-related coastal fish kills was the first European to produce a written record from what is now Texas.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked in November, 1528 on what is today known as Galveston Island, and spent the following eight years living with native people along the Texas coast and attempting to reach Spanish settlements in Mexico.

In La Relacion — The Account of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the book de Vaca wrote of his experiences, he noted the native people on the coast took advantage of “the season when the fish come to die.”

Most translators and interpreters of the work believe the statement refers to the fish-stunning effects of freezes on the coast, which allowed native peoples to easily collect fish for food.

• 1820 — Jane Long, often called “The Mother of Texas” as her daughter Mary was (wrongly, it turns out) claimed to be the first child of European heritage born in what is now Texas, reported the winter of 1820-21 was brutally cold. Long, living at the time on Bolivar Peninsula, reported temperatures dropped so low at one point that Galveston Bay froze over.

Long also noted that her small group survived the winter by breaking ice and collecting the freeze-killed fish beneath it.

•1845-46 — During the Mexican War, 5,000 U.S. Army troops under command of Gen. Zachary Taylor spent the winter of 1845-46 bivouacked on the shore of Corpus Christi Bay in advance of their invasion of Mexico. A major freeze hit the coast that winter, and the troops reportedly feed on freeze-killed fish.

• 1886 — At dusk Jan. 9, air temperature in Corpus Christi was 75 degrees. By dawn, Jan. 10, it had fallen to 16 degrees. The snow storm accompanying the freeze was described in the Galveston Daily News as “the greatest the city, state or even the lower South has ever witnessed.”

According to a history of freeze-caused fish kills written in 1996 by the late Larry McEachron, long-time science director of coastal fisheries for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department: “Based on reliable weather information, this could have been the worst fish kill in the past 150 years.”

• 1899 — The five-day freeze that struck the coast beginning Feb. 12 drove temperatures to their lowest recorded levels along the Texas coast — 9 degrees in Galveston, 10 in Brownsville and Corpus Christi. People rode horses across Nueces Bay. Others ice skated on Galveston Bay. Ships were frozen in ice in the harbors of Galveston and Corpus Christi.

Fish froze by the millions.

• 1917 — A freeze that hit the Texas coast on Feb. 3 was described by McEachron as “believed to be one of the most destructive of the Twentieth Century to marine life in Texas.”

• 1924 — Temperatures along the length of the coast dropped below freezing on Dec. 19 and remained there for more than two days on the upper coast and 74 hours in Corpus Christi — the longest continuous sub-freezing air temperature recorded on the coast up to that time.

The fish kill, while not quantified, was catastrophic.

•1940 — On Jan. 18, temperature in Rockport dropped from 64 into the 20s in four hours, and gale-force wind blew for four days. Temperatures dropped below freezing each day for 10 consecutive days, and more bays froze several hundred yards from shore.

This was the first freeze-caused fish kill fairly well documented by biologists. Biologists estimated more than one-million pounds of fish were collected in the Rockport/Corpus Christi area.

Coast-wide commercial finfish harvest dropped by half for the following two years.

• 1951 — The third freeze of winter 1950-51 began Jan. 28 and was the worst. It was the most prolonged freeze on record for the Texas coast. All bays saw major fish kills, with one state fisheries biologist estimated as much as 90 million pounds of fish died.

The Laguna Madre was hardest hit, losing an estimated 46 million fish. State fisheries staff set a series of gill nets in the upper Laguna Madre that October and November.
Those nets yielded a total of four fish.

The 1951 fish kill crippled recreational and commercial fishing until the middle of the decade.

• 1983 — The Christmas Freeze, which set air temperature records across Texas, plunged coastal surface water temperatures from 60-64 degrees ahead of the front to 35 degrees in less than 8 hours.

Temperature remained below freezing in Port Arthur for 77 consecutive hours.

Ice rimmed every Texas bay. On Trinity Bay, a 4-inch-thick sheet of ice extended almost 500 yards from shore.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department conducted intense, systematic and detailed monitoring of the freeze’s impacts. The estimated death toll: 14 million fish.

• 1989 — Two freezes — Feb. 3-6 and Dec. 22-24 — killed an estimated 17 million finfish.

The February freeze hit the upper and lower Laguna Madre hardest, but caused localized fish kills along the length of the Texas coast. TPWD estimated 11.3 million finfish killed.

The December freeze set air temperature records across the states. Brownsville saw 16 degrees, and temperatures fell to single digits along the upper coast. Houston set a record with 7 degrees.

Texas bays lost an estimated 6 million fish to the December 1989 freeze. The toll would have been much higher, but the February freeze had already stripped the bays of a large portion of their fish populations.

[bubba hotep]

At DFW, Counting record low highs and record lows the 12z GFS would break 7 records and tie 1. It would break record lows 3 days in a row including setting the 2nd coldest February temp twice.

[HockeyTx82]

At DFW, Counting record low highs and record lows the 12z GFS would break 7 records and tie 1. It would break record lows 3 days in a row including setting the 2nd coldest February temp twice.

https://i.ibb.co/cJXfK89/IMG-20210208-131431.jpg

Ok, how believable is that? 7 days way below 32......

Yikes.

[txtwister78]

[somethingfunny]

At DFW, Counting record low highs and record lows the 12z GFS would break 7 records and tie 1. It would break record lows 3 days in a row including setting the 2nd coldest February temp twice.

https://i.ibb.co/cJXfK89/IMG-20210208-131431.jpg

Temperatures like this would likely require snowpack on the ground, clear skies and calm winds, wouldn't they?

[Iceresistance]

Snow has been reported in OKC, & radar is showing Ice/Snow mix in the OKC Metro

[Haris]

[url=https://ibb.co/gM7nX1W][/url

Wow