A severe cold snap has turned the central and southern parts of the country into an extension of the Arctic, with dangerously low temperatures not seen in decades and a blast of snow and ice which has shut down population centers in multiple states.
The historic blast of cold has set scores of records from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border. Oklahoma City is predicted to have its coldest night ever observed Monday, dropping to minus-10 degrees, after seeing its lowest wind chill in the morning of minus-29.
The excessive cold has sent energy demand skyrocketing. In Texas, 2.7 million customers were without electricity as of 11 a.m. Eastern amid the punishing cold, according to poweroutage.us.
The mercury plummeted in the Lonestar State Sunday night while it was blitzed by snow and ice, causing nearly impossible driving conditions and hundreds of vehicle accidents. Officials have urged residents not to travel, as social media videos proliferated of cars and trucks sliding down roads out of control.
Houston’s Bush Intercontinental and Hobby airports were closed, while all flights out of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport were also canceled Monday morning.
For the first time, the entire state of Texas was placed under a winter storm warning Sunday. These warnings for hazardous amounts of ice and snow expanded Monday to cover all of Arkansas and most of Louisiana, Mississippi, and western and northern Alabama, while extending northeast through much of the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, and interior Northeast.
In Texas, officials have warned that people may die of hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning from improper use of generators. The economic toll on agriculture could be staggering, with meteorologists in the insurance industry expecting this event, which should go through the end of the week, to be end with a billion-dollar cost.
Houston’s Intercontinental Airport dipped to 17 degrees early Monday, the coldest reading observed there since Dec. 23, 1989. Tuesday’s morning low could be even more frigid – just 11 degrees forecast by the National Weather Service. The wind chill on Tuesday morning is expected to be just 1 degree.
“Dangerous, life and property threatening bitterly cold air will continue even as the precipitation ends,” the Weather Service in Houston wrote early Monday.
Farther north, wind chills early Monday plunged as low as minus-40 and minus-50 in parts of Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado.
In Texas, the millions of power outages were tied to record-high demand, an electricity grid that is independent from surrounding states, low natural gas supplies, s along with sky-high prices and reduced output from the state’s numerous wind turbines,
Oncor, Texas’ largest electricity utility, which serves 10 million customers, said Monday morning that electricity supply shortfalls are forcing much longer power outages than originally expected. “Outages due to this electric emergency could last for hours & we ask you to be prepared,” it wrote.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) warns it will continue to implement mainly short-term, rolling blackouts across the state as energy demand exceeds supply.
There have been three instances of rotating outages during an Energy Emergency Alert due to weather events in Texas, with the first occurring in 1989, according to ERCOT. Energy demand in the Lonestar State is expected to hit an all-time high.
“About 10,500 megawatts of customer load was shed at the highest point,” ERCOT said in a news release, describing the step of cutting power to reduce demand on the grid. “This is enough power to serve approximately two million homes.”
“Extreme weather conditions caused many generating units – across fuel types – to trip offline and become unavailable.” About 30,000 megawatts of electricity generation has been lost due to the cold and snowy conditions, ERCOT stated. “Every grid operator and every electric company is fighting to restore power right now,” said ERCOT president and CEO Bill Magness.
Punishing cold, ice and snow are also hitting Louisiana, including some of the same areas devastated by hurricanes just months ago. The exceptional cold is affecting about 30 states, with temperatures up to 50 degrees below normal.
According to Greg Carbin of the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma, the area currently covered by Winter Storm Warnings across the continental United States is larger than the land area of Alaska.
Some counties along the immediate Texas coastline near Houston had never been under a winter storm warning until this week. As a first wave of snow and ice pulls away Monday, record cold was being reinforced by northerly winds bringing dangerous wind chills.
After starting the day at minus-5 degrees, Oklahoma City was forecast to peak only around 4 degrees for an afternoon high. That’s below the city’s previous record low temperature for the date. It’s also just 2 degrees away from Oklahoma City’s all-time coldest high.
Kansas City reported a wind chill of minus-32 degrees, the most frigid measured there since 1989.
Dallas hit 5 degrees on Monday morning, its coldest reading since 1989. Likewise, Oklahoma City could drop to minus-7 Tuesday morning, also its coldest since 1989.
The dynamic system was so extreme that it was the first time some meteorologists had predicted ocean-effect snow over bays of the Gulf of Mexico. “Of course, [I] don’t have experience forecasting such things,” wrote one Weather Service meteorologist in an online forecast discussion. “Some thundersleet/[snow] mixed in for fun – even at the beaches.”
Thundersleet and thundersnow were observed throughout Houston and Galveston even along the beaches, with one Twitter user writing they had “seen more lightning in the last hour than [during] most of summer.”
In Houston, emergency officials issued a wireless emergency alert, warning that “life-threatening road conditions will spread through Harris County” while Art Acevedo, the chief of police, reported more than 100 accidents Sunday evening, including a 10-car pileup.
The Weather Service in Houston, which initially warned of “extreme” impacts from this system, wrote Monday morning that “ROADS ARE DANGEROUS – STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”
Hundreds of strikes were observed. Significant thundersnow with cloud-to-ground lightning was also observed in Lake Charles, La., the same community ravaged by back-to-back hurricanes Laura and Delta less than six months ago.
The cold weather is coming directly from the North Pole, via Siberia, following a disruption in the circulation of the polar vortex that occurred in January. It’s helping to spark two major storm systems, the first of which dumped snow and ice on Sunday night and Monday morning, with the second on the way for Wednesday.
Oklahoma City measured about 5 to 8 inches of snow across the metro area, a bit more than what had fallen to the west in Amarillo, Texas.
Abilene, Texas, reported a general 8 to 11 inches, with drifts to 18 inches tall. San Angelo had 10 inches. Preliminary reports also suggest 4 to 6 inches fell in Dallas-Fort Worth. If the official total at the airport comes in over 5 inches, it will be the city’s third-greatest snowstorm on record dating back to 1974.
Webcam images showed snow covering the beaches in Galveston. “We did get someone on the beach making a snow angel,” said Kent Prochazka, lead meteorologist at the Houston Weather Service office. He said the impacts of a cold snap like this one, including the threat of burst pipes in many homes and businesses, “Are so rare here that there’s a lot of preparation that needs to go on.”
Donald Jones, a meteorologist at the Weather Service in Lake Charles, La., said that area is especially vulnerable to extreme cold due to the dual hurricanes last year. “A lot of residents are living in trailers or temporary housing,” he said in an interview. “There were a lot of questions leading up to this event about pipes freezing because a lot of people now have these exposed pipes. There’s a larger homeless population than there was before the storms.”
The central United States is currently the most unusually cold region on the planet, with temperatures reaching 50 degrees below average in some areas. However, the planet as a whole is still unusually mild, and 2020 was on par with the previous record for the warmest year on record.
As the climate has warmed due to human activities, cold snaps have become increasingly rare and less severe, while heat waves have become far more common and intense.
In the United States, winter is the fastest-warming season. In Dallas, the lowest temperature reached each year has increased by 7.9 degrees since 1970, according to the research and communications group Climate Central.
There is also some evidence showing that rapid climate change in the Arctic, which is melting sea ice, is helping to disrupt larger-scale weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, which may make incursions of polar air more likely and lead to extreme heat waves during the summer. This is still an area of active scientific research, however.
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The Washington Post’s Jason Samenow contributed to this report.
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