Texan Magazine
By Meteorologist Albert Flores
If you’ve found yourself saying, “I don’t remember Texas weather ever being this crazy,” let me assure you of one thing: No, it’s not your imagination.
After spending more than forty years forecasting weather across Texas, I’ve heard that comment more in the last five years than at any other point in my career. Now, Texans have always enjoyed bragging about our weather. We joke that if you don’t like it, wait fifteen minutes. We can use the air conditioner in the afternoon and the heater before sunrise. We know spring brings tornadoes and hail, summer brings blistering heat, fall can bring hurricanes, and now and then winter reminds us that Arctic air still knows where Texas is. Wild weather is part of who we are. But lately, even veteran meteorologists have found themselves looking at radar screens and satellite pictures and saying, “Wow.” We’ve witnessed a historic statewide freeze, devastating floods, destructive tornadoes, giant hail, relentless drought, record-breaking heat, raging wildfires, powerful hurricanes and rainstorms that seemed almost unbelievable. So what is happening? Has Texas weather changed? The answer isn’t as simple as yes or no. Texas Has Always Been a weather battleground because of where it is located on the planet. One of the reasons Texas experiences such dramatic weather is geography. Few places on Earth sit at the crossroads of as many competing air masses as Texas. Warm, humid air streams northward from the Gulf of Mexico, which saturates the air on a lower level, not only making it uncomfortable, but also fueling lots of the weather we encounter. Desert air pushes east from northern Mexico and the Southwest. Tropical air moves over us from the Pacific Ocean via the subtropical jet stream that brings it at altitudes over 30 thousand feet. This adds up to an atmosphere that has water all the way up to over 50 thousand feet, making it capable of creating some catastrophic storms across the southwestern part of the United States. At times, cold Arctic air occasionally surges south through the Great Plains. Storm systems sweep out of the Rocky Mountains. When those ingredients collide, fireworks often follow. Meteorologists sometimes call Texas a “battlefield of air masses,” and believe me, it’s an accurate description. The atmosphere over our state is constantly negotiating between heat and cold, dry and humid, calm and unstable air masses. That’s why we’ve always experienced spectacular thunderstorms. They have the fuel (water) from ground level to higher than commercial aircraft fly, to help these monsters grow to enormous sizes with tremendous power. So, what’s different today isn’t that these ingredients exist. It’s that they seem to be combining in ways that are producing storms more frequently, storms that can create weather events that cost both lives and property damage in the millions.
The Atmosphere Is Loading the Dice
I like to explain it this way. Imagine rolling a pair of dice. You can roll any number from two to twelve. Now imagine someone quietly adds extra weight inside the dice. The rules haven’t changed. You’re still rolling dice, but certain numbers start appearing more often. That’s what many meteorologists mean when they say today’s atmosphere appears to be “loading the dice.” Warm air can hold more moisture than cool air. And of course the Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm, which allows it to become an enormous source of water vapor. That moisture doesn’t guarantee flooding. It doesn’t guarantee stronger thunderstorms. But it gives storms more fuel to work with. Think of the atmosphere as a giant sponge. A larger sponge can soak up more water. When conditions are right, that sponge gets squeezed by turbulence in the atmosphere. The result can be torrential rainfall over a very small area in a very short time.
Then Came Winter Storm Uri
February 2021 reminded Texans that Mother Nature can also bring us some extreme weather conditions that normally live in the northern part of the country. When Arctic air poured southward into Texas, temperatures plunged to levels many communities hadn’t experienced in generations. Pipes burst, Power failed, and millions of Texans suddenly found themselves dealing with conditions more typical of Minnesota than San Antonio. People all across the state of Texas were unable to deal with the extraordinary changes in the atmosphere. It was a statewide emergency that few are going to forget! People often asked me, “How can global warming happen if we’re freezing?” It’s a fair question. Weather and climate are not the same thing. Climate describes long-term averages. The term weather really more describes what is happening today. An unusually cold outbreak doesn’t erase long-term warming any more than one hot afternoon proves it. Texas has always experienced Arctic outbreaks. Winter storm Uri simply reminded us how vulnerable we are when a major winter airmass arrives and decides to stick around for several days, with temperatures staying below freezing for 107 hours, with the coldest reading being 9 degrees in San Antonio!
Drought and Fire
Just when many Texans thought we’d seen enough, Mother Nature flipped the script. Instead of floods, we battled drought. Instead of mud, we watched our lawns turn into a barren pile of dead vegetation and soil. Our local lakes shrank to a puddle. Wildfire danger exploded with all the dry vegetation and high winds. People sometimes assume drought means there isn’t much weather happening. Actually, drought is a kind of weather. Persistent high-pressure systems can park over Texas for weeks. Those “heat domes” act like giant lids on a pot, suppressing cloud formation and rainfall while allowing temperatures to soar. The longer they remain in place, the drier vegetation becomes. It only takes one spark, and the state experiences devastating losses due to out-of-control fires. Even if we get lucky and out-of-control fires don’t ignite, farmers lose crops, people lose their beautiful lawns, which turn into hay, and the underground aquifer, which South Texas counts on, drops to record low readings, creating water restrictions and fines for simply watering your yard.
The Return of Flooding
One of the hardest lessons for Texans is that drought and flooding are not opposites. They’re often neighbors. I’ve seen years when the same county suffered severe drought during one season and catastrophic flooding a few months later. Texas weather doesn’t always move gradually; it swings from one extreme to another. The Hill Country provides one of the best examples. Steep terrain funnels rainfall into creeks and rivers with incredible speed. Rocky limestone soils absorb little water. Instead, rainfall races downhill into streams. That’s one reason the Hill Country has earned the nickname “Flash Flood Alley.” A thunderstorm that barely affects one community can produce life-threatening flooding only a few miles away. Why does it seem like heavy rainstorms stall over an area, creating devastating flooding? One question I get repeatedly is: “Why do storms just sit there?” Large-scale weather patterns occasionally weaken, and then the steering currents that normally move storms along and prevent flooding from occurring. Without that steering wind aloft, thunderstorms can redevelop over the same location again and again. The mistake people make is they feel the flood was created by a single storm. Meteorologists call this “training,” much like railroad cars following the same track. Each storm adds another inch or two of rain. Eventually, drainage systems can’t keep up. Such was the flood that killed 139 people in less than an hour in the Hill Country on July 4th weekend, 2025. A strong reminder that we should never take strong thunderstorms lightly, because they are capable of creating millions of dollars of damage and hurt or kill people in minutes.
Tornadoes Still Demand Respect
Texas has always been tornado country. That’s nothing new. But every time tornadoes strike neighborhoods, schools, or businesses, they remind us how quickly lives can change. Tornadoes require several ingredients: Moisture, instability, wind shear. And lift. When those ingredients overlap, rotating thunderstorms become possible. No two tornado seasons are identical. Some years produce many weak tornadoes. Others produce fewer but much stronger storms. The challenge has always been that tornadoes remain highly localized. One neighborhood may suffer devastating damage while another, only a few blocks away, receives little more than heavy rain. The reason the atmosphere can create these monsters is that the central United States is situated where the perfect atmospheric conditions come together: humidity from the ground to over 50 thousand feet, a fast jet stream overhead, and at times monster low-pressure centers that create the rotation in the atmosphere that gives these storms the power they need. Nowhere in the world are there as many tornadoes created as you find in the central part of the United States.
Hail: Texas’ Million-Dollar Ice Cubes
If you’ve lived in Texas very long, you’ve probably seen hail. But lately, many storms have produced stones large enough to destroy roofs, vehicles, and crops. Large hail forms inside powerful thunderstorms where intense updrafts repeatedly carry rain drops upward into extremely cold air. Layer upon layer of ice accumulates until gravity finally wins. The stronger the updraft, the larger the hailstone can become. That’s why giant hail often tells meteorologists they’re looking at an exceptionally powerful and very high thunderstorm. Here is what I call “weather wisdom”. If you happen to pick up a large hailstone, take it inside and cut it open. You will find concentric rings inside the hailstone. Each ring will tell you how many times the hailstone travelled up and down the thunderstorm before the wind could not continue to hold it in the air.
In case you did not know, the Gulf of Mexico has always been Texas’ weather engine. It supplies moisture for thunderstorms. It feeds tropical systems. And it influences the humidity we feel nearly every day. When Gulf waters are warmer than average, more moisture becomes available to build storms. Likewise, ordinary spring thunderstorms often become much more efficient rain producers because they’re drawing from an atmosphere rich in Gulf moisture.
So has the weather changed or not?
Here’s the good news. Believe it or not, meteorologists today have tools we could only dream about when I started my career. Computer models are dramatically better, radar can detect storm rotation earlier, and satellites monitor the atmosphere continuously. Warnings are issued faster and more accurately than ever before. Does that mean forecasts are perfect? Of course not. Weather remains one of nature’s most complicated puzzles. But today’s forecasts do save lives every year. So… Has Texas Weather Changed? What’s changed is that many of these catastrophic events seem to be occurring with greater frequency and, in some cases, greater intensity. Scientists continue studying exactly how natural climate patterns, a warming atmosphere, sea temperatures and large-scale circulation patterns interact. There are still questions to answer. That’s how science works. But one thing is beyond debate. The last several years have challenged Texas in extraordinary ways. The atmosphere is getting warmer, and that is triggering many worldwide atmospheric changes that we are not fully capable of forecasting successfully. After forty years in television weather, people sometimes ask me whether forecasting has become harder. In some ways, yes. Not because the laws of physics have changed. They haven’t. Warm air still rises, cold fronts still move, thunderstorms still need moisture and instability. Those fundamentals remain the same. What’s different is that the atmosphere sometimes seems to provide those ingredients more generously than it once did, and global warming has a lot to do with that change. Here is a fact that will blow your mind. For every additional 1 degree the atmosphere worldwide warms up, 238 trillion gallons of water are evaporated into the global airmass, creating intense flooding and worldwide atmospheric instability. Mother Nature still has a few surprises up her sleeve. That is why meteorologists are never going to be out of a job!
Meteorologist Albert Flores spent 40 years in front of television cameras forecasting the weather in four different markets in Texas. He received a degree from UT Austin in broadcast journalism and in meteorology from Mississippi State. Albert has covered many of the historic weather events in Texas, keeping millions of fellow Texans safe when weather was wreaking havoc! He retired after a 40-year career and is currently creating a YouTube channel for kids about science and nature, called “Uncle Al your Science Pal,” and running a small multimedia company providing visual assets for clients around the state. Married to his high school sweetheart for 50 years, and struggles daily with his Boston Terrier, Sophia.
