By Jennifer Whitlock
Field Editor
The recent winter storm system stretched from the Texas Panhandle to the Rio Grande Valley, and from Far West Texas into East Texas, clutching every county of the Lone Star State in an icy embrace for several days.
It was an extremely rare occurrence and not one we’re likely to ever forget, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Tom Bradshaw.
“This is the kind of Arctic outbreak that happens probably once every 20, 30 or 40 years. We had about a 10-day period in the middle of February where incredible records were broken. If you look at a snowfall map for the state of Texas, it was virtually unprecedented,” he said in an interview with the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network. “We saw all manner of winter impacts. We had snow on the ground all the way from the Texas Panhandle all the way down to counties basically even with or just to the south of Corpus Christi at one point. Widespread two-to-four-inch snowfall amounts were recorded across the state, with bands of heavier snow from the Abilene-San Angelo area eastward up towards Texarkana and down towards College Station.”
Temperatures were as low as -20 at the Palo Duro Reservoir in Hemphill County, with readings in the teens and lower 20s as far south as the Rio Grande Valley and negative readings as far south as Waco.
“The weather models were hinting at a cold air outbreak during the early part of February, so we knew it was going to be colder than normal but as the system started to round into shape and the cold air started to spill southward, we got a much better sense of how significant the cold air was truly going to be,” Bradshaw said. “Then, it’s just a matter of utilizing models, utilizing observations, and just a lot of commonsense meteorological expertise to try to produce the best warnings and forecasts we possibly could for the public.”
Even though every region of Texas saw ice and snow, Bradshaw said the moisture is not likely enough to pull parts of the state out of drought.
“It’s a little bit discouraging in that even though we had a lot of snow, there was not a lot of water content in the snow. So, we remain quite below normal in terms of moisture across a good part of the state,” he said. “It will remain relatively dry across the state for a bit of time to come.”
It was another unprecedented event on the heels of 2020’s global pandemic, and one for the record books, Bradshaw said.
“I think we’re going to be rewriting the record books in many respects across the entire state, and it’s going to cause us to revisit our expectations as to what kind of cold air we can possibly get in February,” he said. “A lot of us were expecting things to start warming up in preparation for spring. It’s a stark reminder that February can be an extremely cold month here in the state of Texas, and we can never forget that. But it’ll be quite a while before we see an event like this again in the future.”