Texas Winter Forecast 2022

Austin,,Texas,-,February,15,,2021:,College,Students,Play,In

By Mike Hernandez, Meteorologist

How time flies!! It’s kind of hard to believe that another winter season is on our back door step.  After last years winter, there are a lot of us that are wondering if we’re going to see a repeat of The Big Freeze!!

There were some cool names that were used to describe that cold snap, Snowmagedden, The Big Chill, Arctic Blast, The Polar Express and the Big Nasty! But whatever you called it, it was a doozy!! February brought one of the most severe winter weather events that most of us have ever seen in the Lone Star state. That was especially true from Central Texas and South to the Rio Grande Valley and along the Coastal Bend. It was pretty much unprecedented there. Of course the Northern and far Western parts of the state are more used to stronger winters but even for them it was bone cold.

Temperatures plummeted to below zero in much of North Texas and in the South we saw single digits for days. The fact that we never got above freezing for over a week caused major power outages for more than 4 million people. It was crazy!! I remember not taking off my coat inside the house for days and pulling out all the blankets we could find for us and for our little doggies. We walked around with candles to see and to warm our hands, and this was all in our house not outside.

I’m not sure if this happened where you were but for us we went through about three to four days where the electricity would turn on every few hours, if we were lucky, for about 20 minutes. We’d scramble around trying to heat some food in the microwave and look for things that we couldn’t find in the dark.

Then the water issues started to happen. We had to boil water for drinking or cooking, if that was even  possible, and were stuck in the house getting low on groceries and gas. You know, I realized just how lucky we are to be able to count on things like that almost all the time without even thinking about it.

And then there was the snow! Austin, San Antonio, and much of the Hill Country had record setting snow totals. Almost a foot of snow fell in the Alamo City and Austin. But for me the fact that we got two snows in a week was the nutty part! I’m sure that’s happened before but not since we started keeping records. So that made traveling very difficult or impossible for days because let’s face it, other than the Northern and far Western parts of the state we are not prepared for that kind of weather. You don’t see a lot of snow plows around like in other parts of the country.

So what happened? What caused this unprecedented cold to take over our state? And the second question is are we going to see this again this coming winter? So let me answer question number one first.

I don’t want to get all meteorological on you,  but there are are few things that happened I feel were responsible for the bitter cold outbreak that I’d like to explain. You can blame the increasingly familiar Polar Vortex, which brought a taste of the Arctic to places where winter often requires no more than a jacket. ­Around the North Pole, winter’s ultra-cold air is usually kept bottled up 15 to 30 miles high. That’s the Polar Vortex, which spins like a whirling top at the top of the planet.

But occasionally as the upper level winds that bind this super cold air weaken it allows for some of the Arctic air to ooze out into Canada and the U.S. Most of the time that will mean the Dakotas, Minnesota, the Great Lakes and eventually New England feel it’s winter wrath. Most years if that happens the Southern part of the country, including Texas usually get just a glancing blow. It gets real cold and snowy with ice in Northern Texas and in the South we see a few flurries in the Hill Country if we’re lucky. Some icy conditions around Austin to San Antonio along the I-35 corridor are also pretty common during these times. It’s been happening more often, and scientists are still not completely sure why, but they suggest it’s a mix of natural random weather and human-caused climate change.

Every once in a blue moon that Arctic air doesn’t just tease us for a few days. Every once in awhile the Arctic air pours straight down across the plains and heads right for us. In the past when that happened it got colder than a normal winter and sometimes a little dicy as well. But last year the cold air just kept coming and coming. The upper level pattern let that cold air run straight out of the Arctic into Texas and the same weather pattern took hold for more than a week. That and a lot of upper level moisture that poured in from the west helped to form the perfect storm! The perfect setup for a whopper of cold snap.

So I hope that sheds a little light on how that happened.

Now the second and in my mind the real question on everyones mind, Is it going to happen again this winter??

To answer that, let’s discuss some of the weather patterns that are setting up for this coming winter that were also in place last winter. La Nina is once again the dominant synoptic pattern. Just about everyone now has heard the terms La Nina and El Nino. I won’t go into a big explanation of these phenomena instead I’ll just say that when we were in a La Nina pattern it typically means warmer and dryer conditions than a normal winter for Texas. So if that’s the case and we had this same pattern last winter then why did we get that incredible cold weather? The answer to that really deals more with the Polar Vortex and what it did and is capable to do again in the next few months. The La Nina pattern tends to develop a strong ridge of high pressure in the Northwest part of the U.S.

At the same time it tends to develop an equally persistent trough of low pressure across the North Central and Northeast parts of the country. And that’s normally where the coldest temperatures are reported during most years. But what we’re seeing more often is the weakening of the Polar Vortex and this allows for some of the Arctic air to drip South. That’s what happened last year!

Since the trough from la Nina was already there the cold air was able to drive all the way into Texas. So the pieces are in place but does that mean it will happen again?

The short answer for me is “No.” One thing I learned early on in my 45 plus years in Meteorology was that when something unprecedented happens in our recorded weather history it likely won’t happen again right away. In 150 years since we started keeping records it hasn’t happened like that and even though I do believe that climate change is accelerating more extreme weather I just can’t get myself to say it’s going to happen this winter. And I’ve got to tell you I don’t mind being wrong but I hope for all of us I’m not wrong about this.

One footnote here. The Farmer’s Almanac is forecasting as it puts it, “chilled to the bone” for Texas. And although I do think we’ll definitely see a few periods of chilly days I don’t think we’ll see anything like the The Big Chill of last winter here in our state.

Stay warm and have a wonderful, prosperous and peace filled 2022. God Bless you all!