{"id":2851,"date":"2011-12-07T11:54:54","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T17:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=2851"},"modified":"2011-12-08T09:09:23","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T15:09:23","slug":"the-year-in-texas-weather-yes-it-was-awful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2011\/12\/07\/the-year-in-texas-weather-yes-it-was-awful\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year in Texas Weather (Yes, it was Awful)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_2857\"  class=\"wp-caption module image center\" style=\"max-width: 620px;\"><a class=\"fancybox\" title=\"It has been one of the worst year's of weather in Texas on record. \" href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z.jpg\" rel=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-large wp-image-2857\" title=\"3487433937_0b800a7d17_z\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z-620x413.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z-620x413.jpg 620w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z-220x146.jpg 220w, https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/files\/2011\/12\/3487433937_0b800a7d17_z.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Photo by Flickr user Bert Kaufmann\/Creative Commons<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">It has been one of the worst year&#39;s of weather in Texas on record.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Texas has seen a week of rains, freezes and even snow. It&#8217;s strange to think back to this summer and the record heat and drought when it feels like we&#8217;re living in Illinois right now. (In fact, as of Tuesday, Texas <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tmdailypost.com\/article\/environment\/texas-has-more-snow-chicago\">had more snow than Chicago<\/a> so far this winter.) Some new numbers out this week show just how bad this year has been for weather in Texas and the rest of the country:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>1 Million+<\/strong>: That&#8217;s how many acres of land burned in Texas this year, a record for wildfires. The number made the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration&#8217;s (NOAA) list of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.noaa.gov\/extreme2011\/factoids.html\">Extreme Weather 2011<\/a>.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>86.7<\/strong>: That&#8217;s the average temperature for Texas this summer, from June through August. While it sounds pretty nice, it&#8217;s the <em>average<\/em> temperature. That means all of the lows in the dead of night while you were sleeping in air-conditioning\u00a0averaged out with the record highs during the afternoon while you were foolishly trying to plant tomatoes for the fall.<\/li>\n<li><strong>86.9<\/strong>: That&#8217;s the average temperature for Oklahoma this summer.<em> Oklahoma beats Texas!<\/em> But Texas did have the hottest June and hottest August, <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.chron.com\/climateabyss\/2011\/12\/watching-those-records-fall\/\">according to state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon<\/a>.<!--more--><\/li>\n<li><strong>90<\/strong>: The number of days over 100 degrees in Austin this summer, 27 of them consecutive. Dallas had 71 (40 of them consecutive) and Houston had a record number of days over 100 degrees as well.<\/li>\n<li><strong>-7.97<\/strong>: That&#8217;s the value of the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncdc.noaa.gov\/oa\/climate\/research\/prelim\/drought\/palmer.html\"> Palmer Hydrological Drought Index<\/a> (PHDI) for Texas in September, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.noaa.gov\/extreme2011\/factoids.html\">according to NOAA<\/a>. It means that this drought is the &#8220;most intense&#8221; one to hit the state over the last 117 years.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Under one inch<\/strong>: How much rain some weather stations in Texas have recorded so far this year. &#8220;The statewide record for least rainfall in a calendar year is 1.64\u2033 in Presidio in 1956,&#8221; the state climatologist <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.chron.com\/climateabyss\/2011\/12\/watching-those-records-fall\/\">says on his blog<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>12<\/strong>: The record number of billion-dollar disasters that have happened this year, with the total amount of damage estimated to be $52 billion, according to NOAA&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.noaanews.noaa.gov\/stories2011\/20111207_novusstats.html\">latest report<\/a>. $5.3 billion (and counting) of that is from the Texas drought, and another billion in losses from widlfires.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Also 12<\/strong>: How much rain fell (in inches) in Texas from January to November, a record dry spell. That&#8217;s fourteen inches below the average.<\/li>\n<li><strong>2.5 Degrees Fahrenheit<\/strong>: That&#8217;s how\u00a0high temperatures were above average\u00a0in Texas for January-November of this year, a record also found in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.noaanews.noaa.gov\/stories2011\/20111207_novusstats.html\">NOAA report<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So is there any good news? Yes and no. NOAA says that in November, &#8220;the severity of drought conditions lessened across northern Texas, where near-normal precipitation was observed for the month.&#8221; But the state climatologist says that\u00a0&#8220;even with normal rainfall in December (which would make December the wettest month since January 2011), we\u2019re on track to have the driest calendar year ever.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Texas has seen a week of rains, freezes and even snow. It&#8217;s strange to think back to this summer and the record heat and drought when it feels like we&#8217;re living in Illinois right now. (In fact, as of Tuesday, Texas had more snow than Chicago so far this winter.) Some new numbers out this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":2857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[61,85],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2851"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2851"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2862,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2851\/revisions\/2862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}