In brief: Another possible hard freeze awaits Houston on Sunday morning with colder air starting once more today. Remember your plants, pets, pipes, and neighbors. However, it does look like we swing back warmer next week for a time before our next chance of rain around midweek.
If you enjoyed the cold temperatures earlier this week, we have good news for you. If you hate the cold, we also have good news for you. Let’s just call it a good news Friday!
Basic cold weather preps again this weekend
We tend to treat the cold with some cheekiness, but it’s obviously always serious business here in Texas when it gets this cold. Saturday night and Sunday morning is the timeframe you want to really take some precautions on the extra sensitive plants, keep the pipes wrapped, and absolutely bring the pets inside.
Today
This morning may see some mixed sun and clouds before we likely go mainly cloudy for the afternoon. There is a chance that we’ll see the back edge of the clouds begin to push through the region by late afternoon and evening, followed by a clear and colder overnight. Highs will be in the 50s today as long as we get some breaks in the clouds or maybe they aren’t super thick. Otherwise, we’ll say upper-40s to low-50s.
Saturday
With clear skies will come colder temperatures tonight. Lows will be in the 30s with a light freeze possible outside the 610 Loop. Temps may dip into the 20s in some far-flung rural areas in Liberty, Walker, northern Waller, Austin, or Colorado Counties. A cold weather advisory has been posted for the entire area for Saturday morning.
Saturday morning’s low temperatures will be cold but not terribly serious. (Pivotal Weather)
Saturday itself should be a blustery but nice winter day with sunshine and highs in the 40s. The wind will make it feel more like the 30s however, even with the sunshine.
Sunday
We would advise cold weather preparations, which most of you already implemented this week anyway to continue on Sunday morning. Lows should drop into the 20s area wide.
Morning lows forecast for Sunday could cause isolated issues to non-winterized or exposed plants, pipes, and pets. (Pivotal Weather)
A few locations may even dip into the teens in rural or sheltered spots. There is even some chance that a few places in the area check in as cold on Sunday morning than they did at the peak of the cold earlier this week. Coastal areas will drop to near freezing. A freeze watch is in effect.
(NWS Houston)
The rest of Sunday looks glorious with sunshine, lighter winds, and highs in the 50s. Just an absolutely picture-perfect winter day.
Next week
We should continue the warming trend Monday with sunshine and highs in the 60s. A few freezing temps are possible in outlying areas one last time Monday morning, with 30s or low 40s elsewhere. Tuesday should be even warmer with highs near 70 degrees and lows in the 40s and 50s. The forecast looks a smidge trickier later next week with a chance of showers or storms and a cold front either later Tuesday or Wednesday, followed by more seasonably cold air than the unseasonable cold we saw this week to close out the first week of February.
In brief: In today’s post we discuss Houston’s brief run at normal high temperatures today, and then look at blustery (but dry) cold front arriving Thursday evening. This will lead to a cold weekend, with the chilliest temperatures coming on Sunday morning.
Briefly reaching normal highs
If you were wondering, Houston has already sailed through the typically “coldest” period of winter. This occurs from January 6 to January 14, when the average high is 63 degrees, and average low is 43 degrees. By late January we’ve already reached an average high of 65 degrees for the month.
However, you may have noticed we’ve been quite cold of late. Houston’s high temperature has not reached 65 degrees in more than a week, and after doing so today (probably) it won’t again until next Monday or Tuesday, at least. So enjoy today’s brief taste of “normal” January weather before another front arrives tonight.
Forecast high temperatures for Thursday: positively balmy! (Weather Bell)
Thursday
We are seeing some patchy fog again this morning, but this should dissipate fairly quickly as sunny skies prevail today. With southerly winds we are going to see temperatures warm nicely into the 65 to 70 degree range this afternoon. A cold front should push into the area this evening, likely between 8 pm and midnight. As there won’t be enough moisture aloft to support showers, I expect this to be a dry front. However its passage will be noticeable as winds will quickly pick up from the northwest, gusting up to 25 mph, or perhaps higher. Lows tonight will drop to around 40 degrees in Houston, with cooler conditions for outlying areas.
Friday
Skies should be partly to mostly cloudy on Friday, with highs generally in the lower 50s. We’ll also have those persistent northerly winds, which will still be gusty at times. A light freeze is possible in Houston on Friday night in Houston, with temperatures likely dropping into the 30 to 33 degree range.
Saturday
A secondary surge a colder air arrives on Saturday, and accordingly this will be a very cold day. Look for sunny skies and highs in the low 40s. Temperatures will bottom out on Saturday night, with lows likely in the 25 to 30 degree range in Houston, with cooler conditions for outlying areas. A hard freeze will be possible, but temperatures should be a few degrees warmer than what the region experienced earlier this week.
There is still some uncertainty in low temperatures on Sunday morning, but this is a reasonable guess. (Weather Bell)
Sunday
Conditions will be a little warmer on Sunday, with sunny skies and highs in the vicinity of 50 degrees. Lows on Sunday night probably won’t freeze in Houston, but it will be close; and a light freeze will be possible further inland.
Monday
We’re going to warm back up into the 60s next week, and this time there will be time for moisture to return to the atmosphere ahead of the next front. The overall pattern is not exactly clear, but from Tuesday night through Thursday I expect a decent chance of rain, with overall accumulations perhaps somewhere on the order of 0.5 to 1 inch. Temperatures cool back down by Friday or so of next week, but at this time a freeze seems unlikely.
In brief: In this morning’s post we discuss the phenomenon of freezing fog, which parts of the region are experiencing this morning. We also talk about Houston’s brief warm-up over the next two days before another Arctic front surges in for the weekend. At least there’s no freezing precipitation this time.
Saturated air …and light winds are supporting the development of fog this morning.
Freezing fog
You’re familiar with fog. But are you familiar with freezing fog? It’s not something we have to contend with too often in Houston, but conditions are such that fog is forming this morning (light winds, dewpoints near air temperatures, etc.) Freezing fog occurs when tiny droplets of fog freeze instantly on exposed surfaces outside, including windshields and walkways. If it’s freezing at your location this morning, which it is for large areas outside of Houston’s urban core, you may notice a slight sheen of frost or ice this morning. It will be slippery so take care.
Wednesday
After a chilly start to the morning, we are going to see highs this afternoon push up into the mid-50s for most of the region. Winds, from the north, will be light. Low temperatures tonight will be a couple of degrees warmer than Tuesday night, but for outlying areas a light freeze (and freezing fog) will again be possible.
Thursday
This will be the warmest day of the week, with high temperatures reaching up to near-normal levels for late January, in the low- to mid-60s for most locations. Some clouds will build on Thursday night, but there likely won’t be enough moisture to support any precipitation as a cold front passes through after midnight. Lows will be in the upper 30s as this front moves through.
Friday
Expect a cold day with partly cloudy skies and brisk northerly winds, gusting up to 20 mph or perhaps a bit higher. High temperatures will top out at around 50 degrees. As skies clear overnight the region, away from the coast, is likely to see a light freeze. I’d expect lows of about 30 degrees in Houston and most suburbs.
Saturday
A secondary push of Arctic air will arrive on Saturday, and this will accordingly be a rather cold day despite sunny skies. Expect highs perhaps only around 40 degrees, with overnight lows falling into the 25 to 30 degree range in Houston. A hard freeze is possible along and north of a line from Katy to The Woodlands, although temperatures should be a little warmer than what we experienced during this most recent Arctic cooldown.
Low temperatures on Sunday morning will be cold across Texas. (Weather Bell)
Sunday
Highs will rebound to around 50 degrees on Sunday, so still cold, but not as cold. I expect Houston to remain slightly above freezing on Sunday night, but a light freeze will be possible for inland areas. If you’re wondering, Sunday night appears to be the region’s last chance for a freeze until at least mid-February.
Next week
Temperatures will rebound into the 60s next week, with nights generally in the 40s. The combination of a coastal low pressure system and a cool front should bring a decent shot of rain into the area beginning Tuesday night into Thursday, details to be determined.
In brief: Did you sign up for the Space City Weather e-mail forecasts, but stopped receiving them? Try signing up again, and also check your spam filters! If you think you should be receiving email and you’re not, we’ve got some troubleshooting steps to follow and an address where you can report problems if the troubleshooting doesn’t help.
We’re happy to be able to offer Space City Weather in your inbox as a free service, and we know from direct feedback that thousands of folks in and around the Houston area enjoy waking up to the SCW weekday forecast (at least when that forecast portends fair weather!).
As one of the oldest still-functional components of the modern Internet, e-mail is an ornery technology. Its co-opting by spammers and scammers has led to an ever-evolving series of standards and safeguards that e-mail senders must utilize in order for their e-mails to be delivered successfully. Sending e-mail in bulk—which we definitely do, to 20,000+ subscribers every weekday, and sometimes three, four, or even five times a day during major weather events!—requires strict compliance with a whole bunch of different rules. There are also legal requirements about how unsubscribing should be handled and how e-mail addresses should be stored, and failing to follow the letter of the law here can mean facing penalties under things like CCPA, GDPR, and other acts emerging from the constantly shifting legislative landscape.
Doing e-mail at scale properly, without cutting corners like spammers tend to do, can be very expensive—potentially more than a thousand dollars per month at SCW’s current volume of e-mail. Fortunately for us, we’re able to lean on a service offered by WordPress as part of their Jetpack tool, called “Jetpack Newsletter.” SCW has been using the Jetpack Newsletter service since around 2017 to send millions of subscriber e-mails at a very reasonable cost to us. Jetpack Newsletter also handles the compliance aspect of things, freeing us up to focus on the weather.
Support speaks
However, we receive a small but regular trickle of messages through our “contact us” form from at least one or two folks every week indicating that they at one point signed up for SCW daily e-mails, but stopped receiving them. This has triggered a review on our end of how we’re using the Jetpack e-mail service, and we’ve been discussing the matter with the WordPress/Jetpack support crew.
After some digging, the Jetpack team is confident that the service is working properly and that they’re not unsubscribing anyone unless there are legitimate deliverability problems. I’ll paste in a bit from what they told us in our latest exchange:
At this time, there isn’t a hard limit on the total number of subscribers who can receive your Jetpack Newsletter. While there are limits on manual subscriber imports, subscriptions made directly through your site are not capped, and we don’t offer paid tiers to increase email capacity.
I took a look at your recent activity and can see that your latest newsletter was sent successfully to the majority of your subscribers and opened by over 22,000 recipients. You can confirm this on your end by visiting Stats → Subscribers in your WP Admin.
In most cases where readers stop receiving email notifications, it’s due to their email address being blocked from sending. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as their WordPress.com email notifications being paused, an invalid or outdated email address, marking previous emails as spam, repeated email bounces, or other deliverability-related issues.
Additionally, Jetpack support suggested a few ways (some of which we were previously unaware!) to monitor newsletter sign-ups and newsletter e-mail delivery status from our end, without us needing to open more support tickets.
Next steps for folks still having problems
Armed with these new tools, we’d like to approach the issue systematically. Here’s how.
First off, if you’ve not subscribed to get SCW in your inbox every time Eric and Matt make a post, now’s a great time to do so! You can use the sign-up link in the sidebar on every page, and I’ve also included the same sign-up form right below this paragraph if you’d prefer not to have to hunt for it:
Join 24.6K other subscribers
Second, if you’ve subscribed in the past and then stopped receiving e-mails, we’ve got a short list of steps to follow:
Go ahead and sign up again, using the sidebar form or the form above, to make doubly sure your address is on the newsletter list. (If you’re unsure if you’ve already signed up in the past, signing up again won’t hurt anything or cause you to get duplicate e-mails, so no worries there.)
You should immediately see a pop-up dialog box telling you that a confirmation link is on the way. After clicking “Got it” on the pop-up, you should then receive an e-mail at the address you used to subscribe, asking you to confirm your subscription. This “double opt-in” step is mandatory and ensures you weren’t signed up by mistake, and that the e-mail address being provided is valid. You must confirm your address in order to begin receiving SCW e-mails.
The initial pop-up dialog at left, and the subscription confirmation e-mail at right. If you don’t confirm both of these, you won’t get our e-mails.
Next, wait a day. Signing up won’t cause any previous e-mails to be delivered, so you’ll need to hang tight until Eric or Matt make their next forecast post. If you’re still not seeing any e-mails after the next day’s SCW post, it’s time to dig a little deeper.
Check your subscription status on WordPress.com. You can use this link right here to look at the status of all of your WordPress-managed subscriptions, including SCW. If everything’s working, your page should look something like the image below, showing your subscription status:
Subscription status page on WordPress.com. The trash icon allows you to unsubscribe, and the three dots at the end of the row contain options to adjust e-mail frequency if desired.
Check your spam folder. Because we’re sending e-mail in large quantities, the headers in our e-mails are required to contain metadata explaining that they are bulk-sent newsletters, and how to unsubscribe from them. Some e-mail system spam filters interpret those bulk headers as a sign that the message is probably garbage and that you probably don’t want to see it, and send the messages to your spam folder instead of your inbox. If this is happening to you, explicitly marking one of the e-mails as “not spam” should correct this problem and ensure future messages make it to your inbox.
Check your “newsletter” e-mail category. Most web-based e-mail providers by default will display newsletters, promotional e-mails, social notifications, and other bulk or transactional e-mails in a separate (sometimes hidden) set of “category” folders unless you tell them to do otherwise. Gmail’s categories can be configured using these instructions, whereas Microsoft O365/Outlook users can check their category configurations here.
Check your e-mail rules and filters for anything that might be routing e-mails away from your inbox. How to do this varies by e-mail provider and even by the e-mail program you’re using. Gmail’s instructions are here; Microsoft’s are here.
If all else fails…
If you’ve verified that you’re signed up and your subscription status looks good, and you’ve checked your spam folder and your filters and your category lists and you’re certain everything is set properly, and after all that you’ve still not received any forecast e-mails, then we definitely want to hear from you so that we can investigate with our new tools!
For folks in this unfortunate situation, please end us a note at [email protected] and let us know. It is vital that you include in your note the e-mail address with which you’ve attempted to subscribe! Without that, we’ve got nothing to search for in the logs and we won’t be able to help.
Please also understand that we have a technical team of precisely one person—me!—and I might not be able to respond the same day. But even if it takes a bit of time to get back to you, please know that we’re looking at every report that comes in to see if there are any problems or issues we can fix on our end.
Thanks for choosing to be a Space City Weather reader. Stay warm out there!
