Houston area residents can expect an encore of colder weather on Thursday before waving goodbye to winter-like conditions and saying hello to the first signs of spring as temperatures continue trending on the warmer side.
“Winter — as I think we know it — is pretty much over, but it’s not the end of cool weather entirely,” Matt Lanza, meteorologist with Space City Weather, said. “We’ll still have a little bit of that to go through, and then we will start to see a bit more volatility in terms of the temperature for most of mid-to-late February.”
“I think we’ll see little bits of maybe not quite that extreme of a change, but you will see a couple more days of cooler temperatures peppered in between some of the warmer ones as we go into early March,” he added.
According to Lanza, a cold front blowing through Houston on Wednesday morning is responsible for bringing the snap of cooler, more breezy conditions, with overnight lows expected to drop to around 50 degrees.
Thursday’s winter-like weather is a “one-day event,” highs will likely not climb out of the 50s. By Friday, temperatures are warming up, with highs in the 60s to 70s and overnight lows in the 50s.
“We kind of get smacked in the face,” Lanza said. “It’s sort of a reminder of where we are in the calendar.”
He added that Thursday’s cold snap is not unusual for spring, but it happening this quickly is slightly strange.
Nationally, Lanza said it has been a “very weird, very warm” winter that will likely end up being one of the warmer winters on record for the United States.
However, he expects Houston’s winter will be considered a bit more middle of the pack due to some colder days — such as the freeze in January — and slightly higher temperatures settling in by mid-February.
“We got a little bit of a taste of winter. It is pretty much over at this point, other than one or two days here or there,” he said. “It’s not uncommon for Houston to have a cooler winter relative to the rest of the country in an El Niño winter, and it behaved that way. But, albeit a little warmer everywhere else overall.”
El Niño is a weather pattern that develops when the water in the eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator is warmer than average. This affects the Pacific jet stream and increases the likelihood of cooler, wetter winters in Texas.
Although slightly warmer weather is expected to return on Friday and into the weekend with highs in the upper 70 to 80s, Lanza said he does not anticipate any 90-degree days in time soon.
However, he noted that it could be possible if something unexpected were to occur.
Lanza said the real issue Houston area residents should be aware of during mid-to-late March is that pollen is beginning to ramp up. He added that it is already showing up in clumps on the ground.
“If you’re not feeling it now, you will be soon,” he said.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
