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Energy and Environment Reporting for Texas

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A Strange El Niño Is Bringing Rain To Texas

When you hear about El Niño, you might remember the classic skit where Chris Farley plays “El Niño,” a pro-wrestling tropical storm. What other weather pattern gets its own Saturday Night Live send-up? Well, after a year of waiting, El Niño is here, and it is raging like Farley. But it’s it’s not like anything we’ve seen before. […]

If El Nino Ever Arrives, It Likely Wont Bring Much Rain

The Climate Prediction Center is out with an update on El Nino.  The weather pattern is often associated with heavy rains, so watching for its arrival has become something of an obsession in drought-stricken parts of the country like Texas. In October, the center was giving odds that the pattern would form before the end of the […]

Fewer Atlantic Hurricanes Bode Well For An El Niño Winter

There’s a good chance of an El Niño weather pattern forming by the end of the year. That could be good for easing or even ending the Texas drought. But it’s not a sure thing. For meteorologists to know El Niño has definitely arrived, warmer surface water in the Pacific needs to engage with the atmosphere. […]

What an On-Again, Off-Again El Niño Means For Texas

Earlier this year Lower Colorado River Authority meteorologist Bob Rose, liked what he was seeing in the forecast. “I’m optimistic that we will get into a pattern of above normal rainfall this fall continuing into next winter and possibly into next spring as well,” he said in April. But since then things changed. After much […]

West Texas Seeing ‘Driest Such Period in Over a Century’

Conditions ‘Remain Dire,’ Outlook Says The drought that began in October 2010 has been the driest such period in over a century for much of West Texas, putting it on par with the drought of record in the 1950s. That’s according to a new outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and it […]

El Niño a Drought-Buster for Texas? Not So Fast, Forecaster Says

Everyone’s waiting on El Niño, the “little boy” or “Christ Child” (since it usually shows up in the winter). This weather pattern that forms in the Pacific could end up redeeming Texas and other parts of the southwest in the form of above-average rain. All signs point to one reappearing this fall, and typically El […]

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