When Will It Snow in Houston Again
Equally we near the stop of October it'due south time to wait ahead to the coming wintertime. While seasonal forecasting is far from perfect, it does have some predictive value. And we know that some people are on edge about wintertime given the terrible Valentine's 24-hour interval freeze the region endured 8 months ago. And then Matt and I are putting together an actress-long outlook with several parts.
Equally a special treat, we're as well going to finally answer the question nosotros get asked about a hundred times a yr: Do landfalling hurricanes in Houston mean we're going to see snow during the subsequent wintertime?
Winter outlook
For the purposes of this post, we're defining winter as the flow of Dec through February. In short: our region of Texas should meet somewhat warmer than normal temperatures, and most- or slightly below normal levels of atmospheric precipitation.
Substantially, the NOAA winter forecast predicts above normal temperatures for most of the U.s.a., and particularly southern and eastern parts of the country. In terms of precipitation, we can expect slightly drier than normal weather for the winter months in Houston and much of Texas. It looks like it could be a snowy winter in the Dandy Lakes region.
The driving gene behind these predicitons is the expected onset of another La Niña pattern this winter.
What does La Niña mean for this winter?
Forecasters are now confident that a moderate La Niña pattern will develop and persist through the wintertime of 2021-2022. A La Niña event occurs when ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean cool beneath normal levels. This tends to have fairly predictable effects for N America during the winter months.
Bold a moderate La Niña develops, this typically places the jet stream a flake further due north across the U.s. than normal. This positioning tends to bring fewer storms and fronts into Texas during the wintertime months, and accordingly we would expect a Texas winter to exist warmer and slightly drier than normal.
That, of course, is the typical pattern. Sharp-eyed readers may recall that a La Niña pattern was also in place during terminal wintertime. So how, exactly, should nosotros feel about that in the context of some other super hard freeze this coming wintertime?
How likely is another February 2021-type freeze?
While naught is e'er sure in life, specially with respect to weather, the odds of having a similar outcome to the February freeze in the following wintertime is very depression in Houston. And the odds are no higher than they are in whatever other given wintertime. Back just before the cold set in, Matt wrote a post well-nigh historic Houston freeze events. The mail touched on like longer-duration cold snaps that occurred in 2018, 2011, 1989, 1983, 1978, 1951, 1940, 1930, 1899, and 1895. None of those occurred in back to back winters.
If we desire to take a more rigorous statistical approach, nosotros tin crunch some more numbers. Dorsum in February we had official low temperatures of sixteen° and thirteen° on the 15th and 16th. So let's look at all winters that saw back to back low temperatures of 19° or colder.
Information technology has not happened in back-to-back winters since Jan 1911 and January 1912. Prior to that, it besides happened in the 1893-94 and 1894-95 winters. Once again, zero is ever sure, merely history is more than likely on our side here.
Do summer hurricanes pb to winter snow?
One of the about common winter forecast refrains I've heard since moving to Houston in 2012 is that if nosotros have a hurricane in summertime, we near ever accept snow in the subsequent wintertime. 2021 saw us become striking with Hurricane Nicholas, then manifestly that ways we should get set up for an 1895-manner snowball fight, right? In words of the great philosopher Lee Corso, "Not so fast my friend."
Let's exist somewhat generous and define "hit by a hurricane" as a year in which a hurricane passed within 125 miles of downtown Houston (Editor's note: Because we are using this strict definition, 2017 was omitted, as Harvey was *not* a hurricane within 125 miles of Houston. Information technology was a tropical storm at that point.) Prior to 2021, 33 hurricanes accept met this criteria since 1895. If we lucifer those years up with years that saw snow in Houston (via the former Conditions Enquiry Center's excellent list), we tin see what years saw snow afterwards a hurricane hit. And so permit's do exactly that. A couple notes almost this: Start, just because "Houston didn't see snowfall," it doesn't hateful information technology didn't snow in some outlying portions of our surface area. "Houston" sprawls pretty far out, but in order to exercise this, we need to encounter some kind of definition. 2nd, yous may discover a aperture between the list of hurricane years and snow years if yous effort to do this yourself. Just remember that if a hurricane hit in 1983, we had to run across snow in the winter of 1983-84 for it to qualify. Incidentally, we didn't, though nosotros had a pretty memorable freeze that winter. Likewise, some years saw multiple hurricanes, such as 1989, 1971, and 1934.
Since 1895, the information (plus 2021) suggests Houston has seen snow in 23 pct of all winters, hurricane or no hurricane. Based on the hurricane data, seven out of xxx winters following a hurricane striking since 1895 have seen snow, placing our odds at—wait for it—23 percent. The takeaway? It's fun to say that Houston sees snowfall in winters post-obit a hurricane. The statistics say that is false, and the odds of snow in a mail-hurricane winter are perfectly identical to the odds of snow in any other winter.
We're just the messengers, but please feel gratuitous to yell at Matt if and when information technology snows this winter.
Source: https://spacecityweather.com/space-city-weathers-official-2021-2022-winter-outlook/
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