Texas Spring 2016

[Ntxw]

Plenty of insurance claims today I'm sure. It wasn't one of those prolific hailstorms from a couple of big supercells (thank goodness) but get in a hailstorm and it can sound pretty scary. Luckily yesterday the dryline did not fire off singular storms ahead of the cold front with the baseball+ sizes that the atmosphere was capable of so it was linear mode mostly.

Chilly and windy today, for late March.

[weatherdude1108]

Not too much rain at my house this morning. Probably less than half an inch. Saw something that really raised my spirits when I got to the office today. The first June bug of the summer! Hot weather isn't far off now!

They have been active up here in NW Harris County for about a month. Also seeing some mosquitos after all the rainfall last week. Emptied almost .80 inches out of the rain gauge this morning.

I have seen June bugs down here for about a month as well. When I go out on back porch at night, I almost always see a June bug buzzing on ground upside down. Very early for June Bugs! Of course I guess that is what happens when you don't have a cold Winter.

[weatherdude1108]

El Nino is fading away. The ocean depths are now getting cold for the impending La Nina



DFW's two years (1906,1973) with no 100's were El Nino-La Nina transition years. Cherry pick

Unsure of how this effects the weather pattern as there really isn't much to go by but the northern latitudes, NPAC and NATL have cooled considerably while the tropical regions remain warm.



1983 March is actually not too bad a fit compared to others. Very solid match in the North Pacific

Using analog of 1983, 1984 was a drought year. That is when I first heard about low levels in the Edwards Aquifer in San Antonio. So I am guessing next year will be drought(?). Depressing.

What was the PDO doing in 1983?

[Ntxw]

1983 was +PDO most of the 80s were so mostly. 1984 was a well established La Nina reinforced by another coming Nina 1984-1985. Second year Ninas are notorious for heat and drought as was 2011.

[Ralph's Weather]

I'd love to experience a Dec 1983 pattern just once.

[lukem]

Looks like 1983 was a very wet year for Texas. I hope we have a repeat.

[Ntxw]

Looks like 1983 was a very wet year for Texas. I hope we have a repeat.

DFW's climo is a lot warmer now than it was in 1983. I doubt we will see a top 5 coldest year. Still though winter of 1982-1983 was mostly a dud for the I-35 corridor and east much like this past winter in the big Nino. First year Nina's tend to have one big blast of winter at some point so we can be fairly confident of that.

[Brent]

I'd love to experience a Dec 1983 pattern just once.

Me too. It's hard for me to even fathom what it was like lol

[gpsnowman]

I'd love to experience a Dec 1983 pattern just once.

Me too. It's hard for me to even fathom what it was like lol

Yes, an absolute dream for winter lovers. I was around 9 years old living in San Antonio when the deep freeze hit. Not as cold in S.A. as it was in Dallas but I do remember it somewhat with the cold and news reports. Very cold for San Antonio standards. I do not recall any frozen precip though.

[wxman57]

I'd love to experience a Dec 1983 pattern just once.

Me too. It's hard for me to even fathom what it was like lol

I can fathom it quite well, as I'd already been working here 3 years. A friend of mine was working in Oklahoma that year. The Arctic air sagged southward very slowly in mid December. Temperature was below zero in OK and in the 70s-80s down here. When the Arctic air finally moved south through Houston (around the 20th-21st, I think), the high the next day was maybe 40 degrees (no precip to cool it down, either). That's the warmest we would see for 6 days. The temperature hit the single digits with highs in the low-mid 20s. There was an inch of snow on the south shore of Clear Lake (lake-effect snow) Christmas Eve, I think. Snow was reported out on the rigs in the Gulf, but it was generally dry on land.

Water pipes burst all across the city. People came home after Christmas trips to see water flowing down the driveway from the burst pipes in their attics. Plumbers had a very good winter season in Houston.

Let's see, I nearly burned down our office building by turning on the heater. It was getting down to around 11F and the AC was blowing full-force on me next to a big picture window. I don't think the heater had ever been turned on for decades. Smoke filled the building, fire department came. Turns out is was just debris in the heater burning off.

Had a repeat performance in 1989, right at Christmas. That front moved south a lot more quickly. More busted pipes everywhere, more Christmas trips ended with flooded houses.

Yeah, those were the days...

[TheProfessor]

It looks like next winter will be front loaded for me in Ohio, from what I looked up the el nino to la nina winters are harsh November-January and February is typically more mild. I'm optimistic though, the winter of 1983-84 is top 10 for snow for a lot of cities in the OV and Indiana area, and it was the 10 snowiest for Cleveland until the 2013-2014 winter.

[gpsnowman]

Goodness wxman57 , I recall you mentioning the heater incident during this past winter I think. That was some serious cold down there. Not sure we will ever see that again but one can dream.

[Brent]

It seems like the cold outbreaks of the 80s were just another time and world... Nothing since has really been in the ballpark. Kind of interesting to me and the same has been true when I lived in Alabama too.

[Texas Snowman]

A little bit of historical perspective on several severe Arctic outbreaks to plunge deep into the heart of Texas (from a story by Houston Chronicle outdoor writer Shannon Tompkins):

-----
http://www.chron.com/sports/article/Tom ... 687256.php

Tompkins: Documenting Texas coast's big chills

By SHANNON TOMPKINS| February 10, 2011[/i]

Fish-killing freezes aren’t particularly unusual events along the Texas coast; dozens of cold-related kills have been documented over the state’s history.

But, as appears the case with this past week’s cold spell, most of the freeze-related fish kills have been relatively minor — glancing blows instead of knockout punches.

A handful of freezes, though, have resulted in catastrophic loss of marine life, killing millions of inshore fish and other marine organisms and leaving behind a devastated fishery that takes years to recover.

A review of historical records over the past 150 or so years indicates a ruinous freeze — one resulting in mass kills of marine life — occurs, on average, about every 15 years.

In that regard, Texas has been riding a lucky streak; the most recent major, coast wide, freeze-triggered fish kill occurred a little more than 21 years ago.

Here’s a brief history of some of the historically important and major freeze-related fish kills on the Texas coast:

• 1528 — The first European to note freeze-related coastal fish kills was the first European to produce a written record from what is now Texas.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked in November, 1528 on what is today known as Galveston Island, and spent the following eight years living with native people along the Texas coast and attempting to reach Spanish settlements in Mexico.

In La Relacion — The Account of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the book de Vaca wrote of his experiences, he noted the native people on the coast took advantage of “the season when the fish come to die.”

Most translators and interpreters of the work believe the statement refers to the fish-stunning effects of freezes on the coast, which allowed native peoples to easily collect fish for food.

• 1820 — Jane Long, often called “The Mother of Texas” as her daughter Mary was (wrongly, it turns out) claimed to be the first child of European heritage born in what is now Texas, reported the winter of 1820-21 was brutally cold. Long, living at the time on Bolivar Peninsula, reported temperatures dropped so low at one point that Galveston Bay froze over.

Long also noted that her small group survived the winter by breaking ice and collecting the freeze-killed fish beneath it.

•1845-46 — During the Mexican War, 5,000 U.S. Army troops under command of Gen. Zachary Taylor spent the winter of 1845-46 bivouacked on the shore of Corpus Christi Bay in advance of their invasion of Mexico. A major freeze hit the coast that winter, and the troops reportedly feed on freeze-killed fish.

• 1886 — At dusk Jan. 9, air temperature in Corpus Christi was 75 degrees. By dawn, Jan. 10, it had fallen to 16 degrees. The snow storm accompanying the freeze was described in the Galveston Daily News as “the greatest the city, state or even the lower South has ever witnessed.”

According to a history of freeze-caused fish kills written in 1996 by the late Larry McEachron, long-time science director of coastal fisheries for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department: “Based on reliable weather information, this could have been the worst fish kill in the past 150 years.”

• 1899 — The five-day freeze that struck the coast beginning Feb. 12 drove temperatures to their lowest recorded levels along the Texas coast — 9 degrees in Galveston, 10 in Brownsville and Corpus Christi. People rode horses across Nueces Bay. Others ice skated on Galveston Bay. Ships were frozen in ice in the harbors of Galveston and Corpus Christi.
Fish froze by the millions.

• 1917 — A freeze that hit the Texas coast on Feb. 3 was described by McEachron as “believed to be one of the most destructive of the Twentieth Century to marine life in Texas.”

• 1924 — Temperatures along the length of the coast dropped below freezing on Dec. 19 and remained there for more than two days on the upper coast and 74 hours in Corpus Christi — the longest continuous sub-freezing air temperature recorded on the coast up to that time.

The fish kill, while not quantified, was catastrophic.

•1940 — On Jan. 18, temperature in Rockport dropped from 64 into the 20s in four hours, and gale-force wind blew for four days. Temperatures dropped below freezing each day for 10 consecutive days, and more bays froze several hundred yards from shore.

This was the first freeze-caused fish kill fairly well documented by biologists. Biologists estimated more than one-million pounds of fish were collected in the Rockport/Corpus Christi area.

Coast-wide commercial finfish harvest dropped by half for the following two years.

• 1951 — The third freeze of winter 1950-51 began Jan. 28 and was the worst. It was the most prolonged freeze on record for the Texas coast. All bays saw major fish kills, with one state fisheries biologist estimated as much as 90 million pounds of fish died.

The Laguna Madre was hardest hit, losing an estimated 46 million fish. State fisheries staff set a series of gill nets in the upper Laguna Madre that October and November. Those nets yielded a total of four fish.

The 1951 fish kill crippled recreational and commercial fishing until the middle of the decade.

• 1983 — The Christmas Freeze, which set air temperature records across Texas, plunged coastal surface water temperatures from 60-64 degrees ahead of the front to 35 degrees in less than 8 hours.

Temperature remained below freezing in Port Arthur for 77 consecutive hours.

Ice rimmed every Texas bay. On Trinity Bay, a 4-inch-thick sheet of ice extended almost 500 yards from shore.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department conducted intense, systematic and detailed monitoring of the freeze’s impacts. The estimated death toll: 14 million fish.

• 1989 — Two freezes — Feb. 3-6 and Dec. 22-24 — killed an estimated 17 million finfish.

The February freeze hit the upper and lower Laguna Madre hardest, but caused localized fish kills along the length of the Texas coast. TPWD estimated 11.3 million finfish killed.

The December freeze set air temperature records across the states. Brownsville saw 16 degrees, and temperatures fell to single digits along the upper coast. Houston set a record with 7 degrees.

Texas bays lost an estimated 6 million fish to the December 1989 freeze. The toll would have been much higher, but the February freeze had already stripped the bays of a large portion of their fish populations.

[Texas Snowman]

And this story, which deals specifically with the 1983 Christmas freeze Wxman57 referenced above:

-----

Christmas 1983 freeze left heavy mark on Texas coastal fisheries

By SHANNON TOMPKINS
Houston Chronicle

AUTUMN'S official final day in 1983 became the unofficial first day of a new reality for Texas coastal fisheries resources, the people who manage them and the Texans who enjoy them.

Events that began that day, 20 years ago this week, accelerated changes in Texas coastal fisheries management philosophy, forced anglers to accept the fragility of coastal resources and left wounds in the inshore fishery that may never heal.

"It changed everything," Gene McCarty, former director of coastal fisheries for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and current chief of staff for the agency, said of what has become known as the Christmas '83 Freeze.

Dec. 21, 1983, dawned seasonably mild with a light, humid southeast wind blowing from the Gulf.

That afternoon, an arctic cold front of epic strength rushed south over Texas, bringing screaming north wind, sleet and dropping temperatures.

Temperature slipped below freezing in Houston the afternoon of Dec. 22, and did not rise above that mark for five days -- a record that still stands.

The Texas coast was locked in one of the most severe, persistent freezes in more than a century.

Christmas morning, Houston recorded a low of 11 degrees. Galveston registered 14 degrees. It was 6 below zero in Dallas, and 13 in Del Rio.

"It was 15 degrees in Palacios," said Paul Hammerschmidt, who in 1983 was a TPWD coastal fisheries biologist based in Port O'Connor. "It was warmer in Anchorage, Alaska."

Another brutal arctic cold front just before New Year's Day reinforced the cold, and kept temperatures below or near freezing for several more days.

"I remember getting in a net skiff with a commercial fisherman in Flour Bluff (near Corpus Christi) on Jan. 2 and going down to Baffin Bay," said Ed Hegen, then a TPWD coastal fisheries biologist working out of Rockport. "It was unbelievably cold. I don't think I've thawed out since then."

What Hegen, now Lower Texas Coast regional director for TPWD's coastal fisheries division, saw in Baffin Bay that day mirrored what other TPWD coastal fisheries staff witnessed when they went afield to survey the bays.

"There were windrows of dead fish everywhere," Hegen recalled. "They were stacked for yards along the shorelines. Spotted seatrout, redfish, drum -- every species in the bay."

The shallow bay was clear as glass, Hegen said. Visible on the bay floor was a carpet of dead fish at least equal to the numbers stacked against the windward shores and floating in sheets on the surface.

Texas inshore marine fisheries had been caught in a frigid, fatal trap. Evolved for life in a temperate, even tropical environment, Texas marine life is not built to endure severe cold. Caught in water about 45 degrees or lower for more than a day, they die. Death can come from suffocation -- the metabolism of the cold-blooded fish slows to the point they can't extract oxygen from the water. Or they can suffer frostbite, having the flesh of fins, tails and other extremities literally frozen.

"The severity and duration of the '83 freeze were what made it so deadly," said Hammerschmidt, now program director of regulations for TPWD's coastal fisheries division.

Fisheries biologists knew fish were dying, but they couldn't get on the water to assess the impact until the worst of the weather had passed.

"The bays literally froze over," Hammerschmidt said. "We couldn't get boats in the water."

"There was ice 4 inches thick for 100 yards off the shore (of the Upper Laguna Madre)," Hegen remembers. "We had to wait until it began breaking up to get on the water."

TPWD scrambled coastal fisheries staff to begin assessing the freeze's impact, surveying the bays from boats, on foot and from the air.

It was worse than they could imagine.

The first place Hammerschmidt inspected was the shallows of the San Antonio and Espiritu Santo bays.

"I went into Shoalwater Bay and it was covered with dead fish -- redfish stacked in heaps like cordwood."

The beach of Matagorda Island was littered with carcasses of adult redfish and the occasional sea turtle.

Texas bays have always seen occasional freeze-triggered fish kills. But almost all during the 20th Century had been relatively minor or affected only portions of the Texas coast.

The Christmas '83 Freeze was different. It hammered the entire Texas coast, from Sabine Pass to Port Isabel.

TPWD coastal fisheries biologists began counting dead fish, using sampling techniques they had developed as part of standardized fish population research the agency had begun in 1975. At the time it was the most avant-garde fisheries work in the nation.

The tally was breathtaking. TPWD estimated the freeze killed more than 20 million coastal finfish. The number of invertebrate marine life -- shrimp, crab, etc. -- lost was estimated at more than one-billion organisms.

Not since 1952 had Texas seen such a widespread and devastating freeze-caused fish kill.

In 1952, Texas fisheries managers could do little to address the effects of such a crippling blow to coastal fisheries. Coastal fisheries were relatively lightly utilized and the Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission (precursor to TPWD) was hamstrung by political realities of the day.

But 1983 was different.

Earlier that year, the Texas Legislature had passed the Uniform Wildlife Regulatory Act, a watershed piece of legislation that gave TPWD authority to set statewide fishing and hunting regulations.

(Prior to the law, counties could, and often did, set their own hunting and fishing regulations, even if in direct conflict with state regulations, blunting scientific management efforts.)

Also, improved science, a move toward proactive management of fisheries and a public becoming increasingly aware of pressure on coastal resources set the stage for what happened in the wake of the '83 freeze.

Almost immediately, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission moved to impose more conservative recreational and commercial fishing regulations.

Fisheries needed the protection.

Anglers needed no convincing of that. The bays were empty.

But TPWD used its sampling protocols to document the massive hole the freeze left in coastal fisheries.

"The freeze proved the value of our long-term monitoring programs,"
Hammerschmidt said. "We could document the state of the fisheries to justify management moves and track their effectiveness."

"That freeze was the thing that shaped our coastal fisheries management philosophy, and turned the focus on conservation," said Gene McCarty. "We began looking at the long-term, and being proactive instead of reactive. It was the direction we were heading, but the freeze accelerated things."

When the freeze hit, McCarty was working at the just-opened John Wilson Fish Hatchery near Corpus Christi, the first hatchery in the nation devoted to producing inshore marine fish for stocking into coastal waters.

The hatchery's focus was on redfish, a species that even before the freeze had been decimated by overfishing.

"Prior to the freeze, we were in the research and assessment mode, just getting our feet on the ground and stocking fish only in San Antonio and Espiritu Santo bays," McCarty said. "After the freeze, we immediately went statewide, stocking redfish in every bay on the coast."

"The freeze kicked our hatchery program into high gear," Hegen said. "We had been initially working just with redfish, but we started doing the first really serious research into raising trout because of the freeze."

Coastal fishing was horrible in 1984 and into '85. But the trout and redfish fisheries slowly improved, statewide.

Then, in 1989, two killer freezes -- in February and another at Christmas -- killed millions more coastal fish.

But the damage from those freezes totaled about half the casualties of the '83 freeze. TPWD imposed slightly tighter fishing regulations, worked on habitat and stocking. It helped that, in 1988, all netting had been banned from coastal waters, a move justified by TPWD's monitoring.

The coastal fishery recovered from those '89 freezes much quicker than in '83.

"That faster recovery is directly related to lessons we learned from the '83 freeze," Hammerschmidt said.

[Texas Snowman]

Fort Worth NWS says EF-0 tornado confirmed in Tarrant County last night not far from Haslet.

[Brent]

So have yall heard Larry Mowry is leaving CBS 11? I was pretty floored when I heard this today... he's going back to Chicago where he used to work to be a weekend met

I suppose it's fitting his last day on TV in Dallas featured a severe weather event.

[Texas Snowman]

Hate to hear that Larry is leaving DFW.

Meanwhile, it feels a bit like Chicago this morning here in the Red River Valley - 34 degrees right now!

Think I'll go for a bike ride!

[wxman57]

I used wxspark to take a snapshot of the 1983 and 1989 Arctic blasts.

1983:


1989:

[gboudx]

I didn't hear about Larry until now. Hate to hear it but good luck to him. Guess I'll be tuning in to Dan Henry on Fox 4. He was my #2 TV weather person.