First, my prayers are with all of you still fighting last week’s misery, and hopefully, you’ll get through cleanups and repairs as painlessly as possible. I had issues myself, but minor compared to a lot of folks, so I’m just glad for the warm weather today! The NWS put out the chart below showing the cold we went through, in terms of time: 44 hours straight of at or below freezing!
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That 13° is the 6th coldest day on record for the month of February, BUT all of the colder days were either in February 1895 or 1899! So we had our coldest February day in more than a century!
Are we done with the cold? Never say never, but I can tell you that this week is a no-brainer. The northern jet stream is way north and the southern jet is right over us:
And this time next week we are in MARCH and meteorological spring is March-April-May. From a historical perspective, our low temperature records the first half of March are all in the low to mid-20s (no teens) and the coldest ever in March is March 3, 1943, when we dropped to 21° (that would have been a Hobby Airport reading). So statistics are on our side for no repeats of last week.
The morning model run
There were a few rumors that we’d have another cold snap next Tuesday-Wednesday, but the latest GFS (American) model run squashes that. First, here’s the USA and you can see the blue areas of cold air the next two weeks stay well north of Texas:
A closer look at just Texas keeps Houston on the warm side:
So any big cooldown is a rumor for now! We’ll keep watching!
Frank