Texas Winter 2010-2011

[benrayrog]

Steve McCauley of WFAA-TV in Dallas said today at 5:15 p.m. that models were starting to suggest it may not be a long-lasting cold event. Anyone else hear that?

[Snowman67]

Steve McCauley of WFAA-TV in Dallas said today at 5:15 p.m. that models were starting to suggest it may not be a long-lasting cold event. Anyone else hear that?

Maybe he was referring to the 18z GFS run, because most of the models previous to that were showing a fairly prolonged cold snap.

[benrayrog]

Thanks!

[orangeblood]

Steve McCauley of WFAA-TV in Dallas said today at 5:15 p.m. that models were starting to suggest it may not be a long-lasting cold event. Anyone else hear that?

Way too early to tell. I've found this board being much more accurate than anything Dfw tv mets put out there. If the cold comes down as advertised by most models, cross polar flow and the Greenland block continues, this cold should stay around for awhile. Besides one run of the GFS, i have no idea where he (McCauley) is getting that kind of info. He seems to throw a lot of things out there just to see of they'll stick.

[southerngale]

Hopefully, any possible precip will fall in the form of snow. All this talk has us reminiscing in the chatroom about the January, 1997 ice storm in the Beaumont area. What a miserable time! Many days without electricity and below freezing. A lot of damage as well.


http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=92245&p=1506089&hilit=january+1997#p1506089

[Agua]

Lived through one around 77 or 78 in Jackson, Mississippi. Best I remember, about 5-7 days without power in an all electric home. Dinner was cans of chili heated on top of kerosene lamps. You can sit around and look at your family for entertainment.

[djmikey]

All Im hearing about is how this storm will affect Dallas/Fort Worth. What about the rest of TX? I wanna know a little more about how this outbreak is going to affect my area in SETX? Any ideas? Thanks

[Texas Snowman]

You're hearing (can you hear on an Internet forum?!? ) the years 1983, 1989, and 1996 thrown around a lot the last day or two.

Here's why - they were historic, in some cases deadly, and very costly cold snaps for both the Dallas/Fort Worth region and the state of Texas.

From Fort Worth NWS:

December 1983
•Series of cold waves December 18-30; a record 295 consecutive hours below freezing
•Inconvenienced travel, strained power supplies
•Many water pipes burst, damaging residences and causing icy roads
•Damage $50-100 million statewide; $1.5 million in Tarrant county alone

December 1989
•Sharp cold wave December 20-24 spread over all of Texas and southeast U.S.
•Record demands for power; many pipes frozen; $25 million in damage at Dallas
•Considerable damage to citrus in Florida and south Texas

January - February 1996
•Five consecutive days (Jan 31-Feb 4) with temperatures below freezing at D/FW
•Lowest temperature was 8 degrees on the 4th of February

[Texas Snowman]

For those of you in South Texas:

December 1983: The first bad freeze of the decade arrived in Brownsville on Christmas Eve 1983. Very cold weather had been entrenched in Texas for over a week when the big blow hit -- North Texas had experienced day after day of subfreezing weather, which each front colder than the previous. The low latitude of far South Texas had protected the area from the first few fronts, but on the 24th a severely cold air mass arrived which spared no area of the state. The temperature that day in Brownsville began sinking from 39° at midnight to 31° at 6:00 a.m. and 25° by noon, with an absolute minimum of 20° the next morning. The following is the temperature data from the 24th to 26th at 6-hour intervals:

Midnight 6:00 a.m. Noon 6:00 p.m.
Dec 24 39° 31° 25° 25°
Dec 25 25° 21° 25° 28°
Dec 26 29° 29° 34°

Most of the Valley was slightly colder -- McAllen recorded 19° and Weslaco had 17°. Though slightly shorter than the outbreaks of 1951 and 1962, this freeze brought a much longer sustained duration of temperature in the mid-twenties or below. Such a prolonged period of deep-freezing weather had not been seen in Brownsville since the previous century. It particularly resembled the cold outbreaks of 1852, 1873, and 1888.

This freeze may forever be known as the freeze that killed the palm trees in the Valley. Anyone who lived in the Valley before 1983 remembers well the thousands of tall slender Washingtonia robusta lining the local roads for mile after mile. The dead stumps were a sad sight on the Valley skyline for several years afterwards -- some still remain to this day. Citrus also received a good beating, the worst since 1951. The Valley got such a cleaning from 1983 it would almost make the worst freeze of the century seem anticlimactic.

http://www.raingardens.com/psst/articles/artic03.htm

[Texas Snowman]

December 1989: Being used to decades of reasonably mild winters, many locals had dismissed 1983 as a real fluke, a once-in-a-century aberration. But six years later, almost to the day after the 1983 freeze, the real "100-year freeze" arrived at the Valley's doorstep. In severity this one took a back seat only to 1899. The 1989 outbreak, in fact, resembled the 1899 freeze in many ways. It was a fast moving, very powerful outbreak of Arctic air which stretched across most of the United States and deep into Mexico and onto the Florida peninsula. Both produced two nights of very low readings in deepest South Texas. The temperature in Brownsville started out in the forties on the 21st, but soon after midnight on the 22nd, the Arctic air began pouring in. By morning, the temperature was entrenched in the twenties. All day, the thermometer hovered around 27°. Then that night, the worst happened: the skies cleared. This sent readings plummeting from 23° at midnight to 16° the next morning, even with the wind blowing through the night. The 23rd was bright and sunny, but managed to get no warmer than 34°. The next night started out even colder than the previous due to the lack of wind. By midnight, it was already 21° degrees, but fortunately the Arctic high was already moving away and the mercury did not drop more than 3° afterwards. Conditions warmed rapidly the next day. The temperatures from Brownsville again follow:

Midnight 6:00 a.m. Noon 6:00 p.m.
Dec 22 44° 29° 27° 26°
Dec 23 23° 18° 28° 27°
Dec 24 24° 21° 19° 47°

Unlike 1983, the 1989 freeze was slightly colder toward the coast. The minimum temperature in McAllen was only 18°, whereas Weslaco again saw 17°. Nevertheless, this was still the only freeze in the twentieth century to produce two nights of sub-20° readings across all of South Texas.

http://www.raingardens.com/psst/articles/artic03.htm

[Texas Snowman]

Again, what the 1983 and 1989 freezes did to the RGV citrus industry:

"The Texas citrus industry was devastated by the December 1983 freeze, which destroyed more than 47,000 of the Rio Grande Valley's 69,000 acres of citrus, and subsequently by the December 1989 freeze which destroyed about 24,000 of the existing 35,700 acres of citrus. Because of these freezes, changes have occurred in the Texas citrus industry, and full recovery to 1983 pre-freeze production levels is still years away. However, it is projected that citrus acreage will return to only about 60 percent of pre-freeze levels."

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/citrus/l2319.htm

[Texas Snowman]

How the 1983 freeze affected game-fish along the Texas Gulf Coast. Excerpted from a Galveston County Daily News story by Joe Kent:

"According to this report, the December 1983 fish kill was the worst we have experienced in Galveston. Before 1983, the longest period of subfreezing temperatures occurred in December 1924. The 1983 spell lasted 77 hours, while in 1924 it was 74 hours.

Saltwater winter fish kills occur about every 15 years, with December 1989 being when our last major fish killing freeze occurred.

In 1983, about 30 million fish were killed."

http://galvestondailynews.com/story.las ... f249e3985e

EDIT: This is from Shannon Thompkins, outdoors writer for the Houston Chronicle:

"In the 1980s, the Texas coast was hit by three severe, long-lasting sieges of unusually cold weather.

In late December 1983, one of the most intense cold snaps of the century enveloped the Texas coast. The temperature remained below freezing for 77 consecutive hours in Port Arthur. In McAllen, at the other end of the coast, the thermometer fell to 19 degrees.

An estimated 20 million coastal fish and other marine life died — millions of speckled trout and redfish were among the victims.

Two other severe freezes — one in February 1989 and another that December — brought the decade's toll of freeze-killed fish to more than 33 million."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/out ... 44945.html

[Texas Snowman]

Not sure what the source of this poster's story is, but here is some info on the 1899 freeze that struck Texas. It was also one of the worst arctic invasions in U.S. history:

February 1899 - The Big One: It was perhaps only fitting that the 19th century close out with the worst cold spell ever known to Texas. The infamous freeze of February 11-13, 1899, arrived almost four years to the day after the 1895 snowstorm. Though not quite the longest freeze ever known, it did bring two nights of unbelievably intense cold to the entire state and much of the nation. Low temperature records were shattered throughout much of the United States, many of which still stand today. It was probably the single worst Arctic outbreak to ever affect the United States.

Not unlike the 1983 freeze, the 1899 freeze came toward the end of a long cold spell which had been persisting throughout much of the country. North Texas was gripped in subfreezing temperatures for over a week preceding the big outbreak. Then during the day of the 11th, the roof caved in.

Temperatures began falling as the day progressed. By late afternoon, readings in the mid to upper twenties were entrenched along the central and upper coast. The real cold arrived later that night. Even when measured against the worst cold waves, this was unbelievable. The event was well recorded in Dallas. Dallas had seen an inch of snow on the 11th, and after sunset the temperature quickly fell from 20° above to 2° below by 8:00 p.m. Nearly every thermometer in town recorded -10° to -11° the next morning. By 11:00 a.m. on the 12th, the mercury had only risen to -5°, and by 8:00 in the evening it had climbed to a balmy 10° above, only to fall back to zero by midnight again (that'll certainly put a damper on palm growing in the Big D).

Down in central Texas, Austin dropped to -1° and downtown San Antonio recorded 4 1/2° above zero, with a maximum of 25° the afternoon of the 12th. Many thermometers around the Alamo city hit zero, and it was cold enough for boys to skate on the frozen San Antonio River. Cuero was particularly cold for central Texas, reporting -4°.

Most amazing were the reports from the Weather Bureau of Galveston. The temperature there started out at 28° the evening of the 11th, and had fallen to 10° by 8:00 a.m. on a cloudy, windy morning. The strongest part of the cold air evidently passed over them late that morning. After sunrise, the temperature did not go up but instead continued to fall through the morning, bottoming out at 7 1/2° around 11:00 a.m. By 1:00 p.m. the mercury was still at 11°. Not only is that the lowest temperature ever recorded in Galveston, but it came nearly at midday under a cloudy, windy sky (the next night, incidentally, the skies cleared and the wind calmed but the temperature did not drop below 10°). A few places west of Galveston on the bay were known to have frozen completely over from the barrier island to the mainland.

Further south, Alice bottomed out at 5° on the morning of the 12th, and Laredo reported the same temperature the following morning. Corpus Christi had 11° the first morning, and 16° the second, with sheets of ice extending far into the bay. North of town, the Nueces River reportedly froze "hard enough to pass over." Port Isabel reported a low of 20° for the month but gave no further details.


http://texaskayakfisherman.com/forum/vi ... 1&t=135493

[djmikey]

Anyone else?

[Texas Snowman]

One more, again from Shannon Thompkins, outdoors writer for Houston Chronicle. Amazing tale of how the Dec. 1983 event unfolded in SE and S. Texas.

Christmas 1983 freeze left heavy mark on Texas coastal fisheries

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.



http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/2319895.html

[txagwxman]

6 below dallas

It wasn't 6F below in Dallas in 1983...I think it was 6F above.

Dec 1989 it was 2F College Station, and -4F Waco, 7F IAH, and 8F in my backyard in SW Houston.

We won't see these types of temps with this one---unless the second surge does it. The original surge the cold air is not cold enough to support those temps. But could see teen Dallas next week if the Euro right.

See what the overnight models do.

[Tireman4]

6 below dallas

It wasn't 6F below in Dallas in 1983...I think it was 6F above.

Dec 1989 it was 2F College Station, and -4F Waco, 7F IAH, and 8F in my backyard in SW Houston.

I think it got down to 13 in Santa Fe...I think.. I was a senior in high school.

[KatDaddy]

I remember the 1983 and 1989 Arctic Blasts. The most extreme cold in modern times for SE TX.

[gboudx]

If the cold comes down as advertised by most models, cross polar flow and the Greenland block continues, this cold should stay around for awhile. Besides one run of the GFS, i have no idea where he (McCauley) is getting that kind of info. He seems to throw a lot of things out there just to see of they'll stick.

McCauley is almost always the met that will go out on a limb showing extended models and what might happen. It was odd to see him say this tonight.

[Texas Snowman]

6 below dallas

It wasn't 6F below in Dallas in 1983...I think it was 6F above.

Dec 1989 it was 2F College Station, and -4F Waco, 7F IAH, and 8F in my backyard in SW Houston.

We won't see these types of temps with this one---unless the second surge does it. The original surge the cold air is not cold enough to support those temps. But could see teen Dallas next week if the Euro right.

See what the overnight models do.

Yeah, saw the -6 mistake for Dallas. Think you are right, it was 6 above in Big D.

As for those types of temps, I'm not so sure we will not see them.

Initial frontal passage, no.

But this looks to be severe cold and prolonged cold. Add the two together, throw in a snowpack nearby, and a clear night of radiational cooling and I think sub-zero overnight readings in North Texas could happen.

Of course, that is my unofficial thoughts and ideas, not an official forecast that anyone should put stock into.