A Warming Arctic Could Be Bringing Cold Spells To Texas

Despite a few cold days, Austin’s 2017 temperatures were just 1 degree below average.

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By Mose BucheleJanuary 19, 2018 9:30 am, , ,

From KUT:

Like most everyone else, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has been feeling the chill lately. He’s even taken to wearing a coat in his office at Texas A&M.

“My office has been in the 50s the past couple days,” he said Thursday.

Despite that inconvenience, he doesn’t see this winter as out of the ordinary when it comes to average temperatures.

Austin, for example, is running only about 1 degree Fahrenheit below its historic average temperature since the start of December, Nielsen-Gammon says, “which is not very far at all, given the normal variability of winter weather.”

What sticks out isn’t the average temperature, but the extreme cold spells. We’ve had three cold fronts push in so far this year, something he calls “unusual, but it’s still not exceptional.”

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