WEATHER BLOG

Can you stand another supermoon?! This month is our last for the year and shows up August 11 at 8:36pm! If the skies are clear, I’d expect a pretty fabulous moonrise in the east, opposite the setting sun. This one is called the Full Corn Moon although, as we are seeing, Texas corn is not doing so well as production is generally less than half of normal. So we can go with the other name: the Full Sturgeon moon--one of the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen but August is peak season for catching them in the Great Lakes.

We’re all exhausted by this relentless heat and a viewer asked: Is this related to the El Nino, La Nina effect? Do we expect a shift anytime this year? Thanks, Greg

We all pretty much know we’re in a drought, and if you look at the past 22 years, this is the second worst since 2011.

I’ve had a number of viewers asking me about the lakes given the drought situation and that is a legitimate concern. On the face of it, our regional lakes are not looking too bad, about 5% below capacity.

Talk about heat that isn’t horsing around! We’ve had more days in July with 100+ temperatures than not and we’re in for another week of them, not to mention that we’ve already had several hot months. In fact, since April 10th, at which time we were having a beautiful spring, we’ve averaged 88% ABOVE NORMAL high temperatures!

Talk about heat that isn’t horsing around! We’ve had more days in July with 100+ temperatures than not and we’re in for another week of them, not to mention that we’ve already had several hot months. In fact, since April 10th, at which time we were having a beautiful spring, we’ve averaged 88% ABOVE NORMAL high temperatures!

Color my heat-exhausted red face jealous when I hear someone in the springtime tell me they’ll be “summering” in cooler climes....seeking a mountain manse in Aspen, a cliff cottage in Portland, or perhaps a Berkshires bungalow. Anything to escape the Houston heat! Even if you can afford it, such a summer retreat may be hard to come by in the next several decades.

If you watch KPRC 2, then you may have noticed lately that sometimes the high temperature for the day doesn’t actually occur until after 5 p.m. and, often, closer to 6 p.m. Despite the sun being highest in the sky around noon, the heat builds all day to its crescendo in the later afternoon. In turn, the earth cools all night so that our coolest temperatures are usually right at dawn (ask walkers and joggers). This daily lagging effect applies to our seasons, also. It’s called the seasonal lag effect.

You’ve probably heard corny jokes, but how about a corny story? Well, Gail Galloway on my Facebook page posted the above picture with this yesterday: We had over 50 corn husks falling from the sky. What do you know about this. We are in Hockley...at Someday Farm. And Gail says they have horses, not corn. You can see a few scattered corn husks here from around 4pm:

I had this email from a viewer a few months ago:

This came along in the email collection over the holiday weekend:

As you know, we had ONE day in June where temperatures didn’t reach 90° thanks to the tropical disturbance just offshore--of course, that is officially at Bush/IAH. If you were west and north, you were plenty hot again yesterday. Here’s the month we just went through:

Whenever I speak, I invariably am asked which computer model is best, the American (GFS) or the EURO (ECMWF) to which I shrug and give examples of which computer did better at which times.

You’ve heard the rain rumors for this week, but I can tell you now we’re not promising a lot! A weak cold front will be pushing through today and tonight, then meander around the gulf the next few days. Tomorrow, it will be offshore:

This is not supposed to happen this early!

I pick the brains of Climate Central a lot in this blog and want to introduce a new tool they debuted yesterday! The Climate Shift Index (CSI, but not the TV show!) is designed to illustrate the influence of human-induced global warming in today’s real-time environment....the shift we’ve seen in temperatures. How much of these sweltering temperatures we’re experiencing right now can be directly contributed to our own global warming? You can see the graphic below illustrates the idea of today’s world vs what we’d have without the increased warming:

We did it “officially” yesterday--100° for the first time since August 29, 2020 and the forecast for the week ahead has a LOT of triple digits in it:

Dusty, hot days continue for us and you’ve probably heard me say that the Saharan Air Layer inhibits tropical storms from forming: the dust is dry for one thing and also has a downward motion. Itchy eyes are with us for a bit as it looks like we’ll see more dust the better part of the week (literally, as dust does make for nice sunsets, like the one above over Bolivar last night).

With the relentless afternoon heat, perhaps many of you have taken to early morning walks before sunrise when it’s at least a little cooler. Although upper 70s with high humidity is no picnic, the skies above at least offer some amazing viewing for your star gazing pleasure!

I received this email yesterday:

I’ve been talking all year about La Nina, that cooler-than-normal water in the Pacific, which basically means dry weather for Texas and a lack of upper level winds across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Its opposite, El Nino, is warmer than normal Pacific water which creates those upper level winds and those winds can shear apart developing tropical systems. So El Nino is El Amigo in that regard! La Nina not so much.

The remnants of the Pacific’s Hurricane Agatha look poised to redevelop in the Caribbean on this first day of the Atlantic Hurricane season and I’ve been getting emails like this:

Get ready now for tropical storm season 2022....all the forecasts are predicting above normal numbers of hurricanes and the National Hurricane Center (part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) came out yesterday with no exception:

Something we haven’t heard in a while boomed across the area Sunday morning---thunder! Storms rolled through producing heavy downpours and damaging winds. Brace yourself for more both tomorrow morning and again Wednesday morning! Tuesday’s storms are ahead of a cold front coming our way and Wednesday’s storms will arrive with the front itself. Here’s Wednesday’s surface analysis:

As they say, pick your poison....while we brace for another day of record heat, Denver begins a day of Winter Storm Warnings! Where would you rather be?

The above NOAA pic of the Atlantic Ocean skies full of Saharan dust is from 2006 and you can imagine that any tropical showers and storms would have a zero percent chance of forming in that kind of atmosphere. Those dusty skies are dry for one thing and particulates are falling downward toward Earth, suppressing any upward motion required to get tropical storms to build.

Last Wednesday, all the Media-rology lit up with a potential Category 4 hurricane in the Gulf (headed toward Texas, no less) just in time for Memorial Day weekend. The cover shot today shows what was going around. This was a forecast from the American model a good two weeks out. We call these hurricanes from the model a “modelcane” and I’ll explain what’s going on in a moment. Suffice it to say that, first of all, there has never been a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico in May, so that would be highly unusual, and second, never trust a model more than a week out, especially for tropical systems that develop in the Caribbean’s west end. Trust me, things will change.

I received this viewer email just the other day:

As I write this and check my pool water, it’s an amazing 88°! Totally ready for swimming, but the pool is a shallow body of water and easy to heat up when we’re having record heat! The Gulf of Mexico water is still hovering in the upper 70s to low 80s near shore, but 80° is that magical threshold where the water is warm enough to sustain tropical storms and hurricanes. And that number, which calculates to 26° Celsius, is abundant and even higher goes to 28°C right now:

We know Houston gets hot, but even the most stalwart may be feeling like a duck out of water these days! Why is it so hot? We have in place what is called an omega blocking pattern -- low pressure on either side of the country with a big High in the middle. That high produces the relentlessly dry, sunny, hot days and blocks any front from moving through which might cool us down. Here’s the pattern and below I’ve drawn in the Greek letter omega so you get an idea of that resemblance:

Happy Mother’s Day! That’s my mom, Pat, in the cover photo today! She passed last year shortly after Mother’s Day but taught me to always remember the good times and I certainly do. However, many of us will remember THIS Mother’s Day for the heat!

Hopefully, you’ve heard that our Mother’s Day weekend is going to bring a motherload of heat!

You may have heard that last week the World Meteorological Organization retired the hurricane name “IDA”, a decision based on the death and destruction the storm caused in both Louisiana and New York. Whenever I speak, the question comes up of how the names are chosen in the first place and the answer is that they are chosen to reflect the different nationalities that Atlantic basin storms can affect and so there are American, French, Spanish, Dutch and English names. I have written the WMO before suggesting that the names should be more reflective of all the people living in such countries--we are a very diverse people these days! So I was pleased to see the name IDA replaced with IMANI, a name of Arabic origin meaning “faith.” There are six hurricane name lists that rotate so you will see some new names and some familiar ones every six years! Here is the 2022 list:

Every year the seasonal hurricane forecasts start rolling in during April and this year they are all pointing to another busy season! An average season brings 14 storms of which 7 become hurricanes and 3 become major. This coming season looks to be above that average with as many as 20 storms and 5 major hurricanes, depending on who you ask. Here are some of the recent forecasts:

The hurricane above is pretty straight-forward--clearly with that eye we have a well-formed intense tropical cyclone. But just how strong are those winds? And look at the tropical storm below which was determined to be a tropical storm:

Happy Earth Day!

Yesterday was National Hanging Out Day (isn’t there a day for everything now?) and a Click2pin viewer in Columbus toasted the day hanging out with a friend:

Hopefully you enjoyed that beautiful full “pink” moon over the weekend and while it’s named for the pink ground phlox flower, today’s cover picture shows a bit of a pink moon! Same chip chart anyway.

Happy holiday weekend to you! Whether you are celebrating Easter, beginning Passover or just hanging, it looks to be a warm, partly cloudy weekend with only a smattering of showers now and then (thanks to a more humid southeast wind off the gulf).

I’ve written recently about the 1992 Channelview tornado outbreak when, fortunately, not a life was lost. The best we could do then to warn the public was break into live TV. By the time we received a warning from the National Weather Service and typed that warning into a crawl machine and then put it on air a good twenty minutes would pass. But those were the two warning methods for television along with NOAA weather radio. So we’ve come a long way. But not far enough.

Last week at the National Tropical Weather Conference, Dr. Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University presented his 2022 Tropical Storm forecast. Accuweather had delivered theirs just a few days before. And while some headlines screamed “Monster season” most went with “busy” or “above normal”. You might remember that ‘normal’ recently increased from 12 storms to 14 and the considered average now is 14 tropical storms of which 7 will become hurricanes and 3 of those will become Major hurricanes of Category 3, 4 or 5. I made a chart of the two forecasts so far:

There’s a lot going on in our April sky, especially for you early risers. The fortunate part is that while we are likely to see at least a day of rain each week, forecasts are calling for mostly dry skies (at least through the middle of the month). That means these comfortable walking temperatures and clear morning canvases will continue!

For decades we’ve heard of Tornado Alley, running from North Texas across Oklahoma and Kansas across the corn belt to Minnesota. The central United States is where, geographically, warm and moist Gulf air has met cold air off the Rockies to set up the perfect tornado recipe: warm air below, cold air above, spinning winds from several directions at the surface of the Earth with faster winds above. That recipe more and more is moving East. Already this morning (around 4:20 a.m.) a destructive tornado tore through Springfield, Arkansas. Here’s ExactTrack radar:

I love the big, stately Oak tree in my front yard but this time of year nature takes a turn on my sinuses. If you look at my sidewalk, it’s easy to see why:

You’ll remember just a week ago we were smelling wildfire smoke here in Houston from the East Wing Complex fires.

Houston, TX Here we are the end of May with the official beginning of hurricane season on Monday and weve already had two named storms--Arthur and Bertha--with a third possible. The photo above is Cristobal in 2014 and because the list of hurricane names rotates every six years, that C storm is back on the list. In fact, only 1951 has recorded three tropical or subtropical systems before June 1st: one in January, followed by Hurricane Able and a tropical depression in May. Well, for starters there were 17 depressions, 12 of those became storms, 8 of which became hurricanes (three major hurricanes). Notably, a January start will make for a long year and the 1951 season didnt end until December 11th!

On Sunday, Jan. 19, an eight-minute test took place, one all-important test to make sure that if SpaceX should need to abort after launch then the crew could safely make it back down to Earth. credit SpaceXThe capsule, pictured below, fell perfectly and safely to the ocean water. Watch that first as its very interesting and helpful when understanding what really took place. As of this writing the launch itself is at a 60% chance of happening as the sky really needs to be rain- and cloud-free. But its comforting to know that if things do go awry during the launch, there is an emergency plan.

The NHC anticipates a 60% chance for an ABOVE-normal season, a 30% chance for an AVERAGE season, and a 10% chance for a BELOW-normal season. Water is the fuel for hurricanes in that warm water creates warm air and that warm air rises into the atmosphere creating showers and thunderstorms. Above Normal Water water temps in the Gulf, Caribbean and Atlantic. Courtesy tropicaltidbitsBut if that rising air is disrupted by the wind then, of course, the storms wont form. And when you already have storms moving over the ocean you bypass that first step of rising air to create the storms to form a hurricane!

This week, with near-record highs every day, it might seem like were always talking about a warmer world -- and we are. This year is now expected to be in the top five warmest years for the world and were not even halfway through it! Scientifically, in a warmer world, it only stands to reason that the fuel for hurricanes, which is warmer water, will create stronger storms -- and it is. Last Monday, a study of 40 years of data was released examining satellite information to determine stronger hurricanes over the period, in line with yearly warmer temperatures. and his paper in 2018 proposed that hurricanes are slower-moving over land due to a warmer world thereby causing more flooding (e.g.

Tropical Storm Arthur said hello over the weekend, starting our hurricane season -- once again -- before the official June 1 date. So there are two obvious questions:Does an early start mean well have a shorter season? In 2003, we had an April system show up and the season didnt end that year until December 11th. Hurricane Jerry October 1989, our latest hurricane to strike the Texas coastDoes an early start mean well have more hurricanes? What can we learn from an early start?

Houston, TX Models for tomorrows flooding are updating and I wanted to share with you some of what we are looking at here at the KPRC2 Severe Weather Center. First, we always like to compare the Euro and American models and I can tell you that while the Euro does have a good reputation for more accuracy, the two are both strong. In fact, the Euro USES American satellite information so without the American influx of data, the Euro wouldnt be where it is. The RPM has only 1-2 of rain for Houston with perhaps 2-3 in spots with more down south:RPMThe HRRR on the other hand shows heavy rain south of I-10 and into downtown. If we do not see heavy rain in southeast Texas then consider ourselves plain lucky.

HOUSTON Ive written before about the role of airplanes taking and reporting weather observations as they ascend and descend, as well as at flight altitude. Known as the AMDAR program, these commercial aircraft flights traditionally produce 700,000 observations a day (temperature, humidity, and wind). With stay home orders around the globe, there are weather offices with no weather person to physically read and report the data! In addition, the WMO notes that over time even automatic stations will need repair and calibration, so we may see more data dropping out in the next weeks or months. Still, and thankfully, there are a LOT of ways to observe the weather these days.

Houston, TX The coronavirus clearly dominates the headlines, but, over the next few weeks, different forecasts for the Atlantic 2020 Hurricane Season will be edging into our news cycle. Normal count is for 12 tropical storms and of those 6 become hurricanes with 3 becoming major hurricanes. ACCUWEATHER published their forecast this week calling for not only a higher than normal number but also adds the number of impacts to the United States. You can read the full Accuweather hurricane forecast right here. Ive also talked about Dale Links forecast which doesnt predict number of hurricanes but rather where theyll go.