In brief: Houston will see a warming trend this week, with high temperatures eventually pushing near 70 degrees by Friday or so. We’ll also see plenty of clouds later this week, along with some modest rain chances from Wednesday onward. A strong front arrives on Saturday, and this will usher in a period of significantly colder weather next week.
Early post
Surprise! As I write this it is 5:15 am ET in the Orlando airport, and I am awaiting an early morning flight back to Houston. I’ve been up all night so this post will be fairly brief, but I wanted to dash it off before I pass out. It was an eventful night, with the debut launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket scrubbed during the final hour of a three-hour launch window. Alas.
Monday
After a chilly start this morning, we should see clearing skies and high temperatures in the mid- to upper-50s. Winds will be brisk, from the north, for much of the day adding an extra bit of chill. Lows tonight will fall to around 40 degrees in Houston. This is likely to be our coldest weather until next Sunday morning.
Tuesday
As winds shift to come from the northeast, we’ll see some more clouds in the sky, and this should limit high temperatures to the mid-50s. Lows on Tuesday night will only drop into the mid-40s as increased cloud cover provides a bit of insulation.
Wednesday and Thursday
As high pressure moves east we’ll see the southern portion of the Houston region become susceptible to a bit of rain. Don’t expect anything serious, but some areas south of Interstate 10 could pick up perhaps half an inch of rain, or a little more, during this period. Chances for inland areas are lower, perhaps just 10 or 20 percent each day. With partly to mostly cloudy skies, expect highs in the mid- to upper-50s. Lows will be milder, in the upper 40s mostly.
Friday
This will be a warmer day, with partly sunny skies and highs of about 70 degrees. Break out the shorts! However there will also be a decent chance of rain (again, mostly light) so this may not be a spectacular day all around. Lows on Friday night will only drop into the upper 50s.
Saturday
This will be another mild day, with highs near 70 degrees and partly sunny skies. At some point on Saturday, perhaps around noon, afternoon, or the evening, a cold front will push into the Houston area. This may bring an additional shot of rain, followed by stronger northerly winds that will really dry us out.
Sunday
The forecast for Sunday, and the Houston Marathon, is continuing to come into better focus. Low temperatures on Sunday morning are likely to be in the upper 30s or lower 40s, but it will feel colder with what is expected to be a fairly stiff northerly breeze. While there’s still the potential for some change, my advice is to prepare to bundle up. Skies should be clearing so I don’t anticipate precipitation being an issue. High temperatures may reach the upper 40s or 50 degrees before another cold night.
Next week
There are no bones about it, next week looks pretty cold. I do think we’re likely to see freezing conditions in the Houston metro area on at least one or two nights, but it remains to be seen whether we see a hard freeze (defined as 28 degrees F or below by the National Weather Service) in Houston. Several people have asked about the potential for snow, or a wintry mix next week. I do think it’s possible on Monday or Tuesday nights, but we just have to see how cold temperatures get, and whether we see any precipitation during these colder times. It’s something we’ll continue to keep an eye on, but it will be a few days at least before we have any definitive answers.
Currently we are 4.6 degrees below normal for the month! Did the weather shift back to where it was before The Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976? Did the Beaufort Gyre stabilize and dump all its cold fresh water back into the North Atlantic and disrupt the thermohaline circulation? Did we experience a Bond event like the Younger Dryas? I was accepting the narrative that this type of winter was unlikely again in a warming world. Is it going to stay this cold until April?
The answer to all those questions is “probably not”. The forecast is also not incompatible with a warming world.
Nah the polar vortex is just being willy nilly, we are still having a really warm January globally in terms of land temperature.
Yep but the deniers will stay say that global warming is not real because one small location on the Earth is experiencing cold weather at the moment.
Uh no. It is getting warmer. Maybe a degree here? I’m sure it will get warmer very slowly. No doom.
Not maybe a degree, more like around 4 degrees of warming for Houston. E every year in the 2020s is a top 10 warmest (depends on airport). 2024 was the warmest breaking the record from 2023, followed by 2020 being neck and neck for 3rd with 2017 and 2021 around 5th. 2022 is around 10th.
Most of the peer reviewed papers indicate about one degree of warming. No way no how it is 4 degrees for Houston. When I averaged the first decade of the 1900’s with the last decade it was about .6 degree F difference. Some of that .6 can be attributed to the Urban Heat Island effect. I agree, concern but no doom.
This is one of the reasons the term Global warming was replaced by Climate change few years back. While the earth is warming, what it will result is in more weather extremes and not just warm weather. We have seen this with the increase in hurricanes and tornadic activity, longer summers and stronger heat waves and yes stronger cold waves when they do happen. There is no scientific narrative anywhere that this type of winter is unlikely in a warming world like you claim.
There is a lot of bad information out there. There really has not been an increase in either hurricane or tornadic activity. As a matter of a fact there is evidence that we may see fewer tornadoes in a warming world due to less of temperature difference between the higher latitudes and the tropics. Arctic amplification seems to indicate that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the globe and the difference in temperature between the two is decreasing. This difference and the clash between the colder and warmer air in the spring is what fuels tornados.
Tornadoes will become more common in the winter months as warming creates steeper temperature clashes with the Arctic and the warm water bodies. Spring will become more and more like summer with more evenly warm temperatures around all of North America and warmer “wintry air remains”.
Sh – you confuse Houston’s past few years of hot with global warming. Global warming since 1980 is around 2 degf. Majority at the poles. This is a slow process. No doom here.
I didn’t claim that, and neither have climate scientists. There is actually a growing hypothesis that a warming world will increase the frequency of cold snaps in lower latitudes because warmer air intrusion into the north pole will weaken the polar vortex more often.
While cold snaps may increase in frequency, average winter temperatures will still continue to go up and that has already happened over the past 3 decades.
Are there any Climate Change Science Brains who aren’t smug assholes? Asking for a friend.
As a photographer for the marathon, It’ll be greatly appreciated if we can at least stay dry… cold plus wet plus windy plus sitting in one place for 8 hours is less than Ideal.
BL.
If it was a warm, dry and calm day would you still sit in one place for 8 hours? Why not get up and move around, whether it is cold and wet or warm and dry? Sitting for 8 hours is not healthy and no job is worth that.
Hey marathoners: its January, what do u expect?
Well, the outlook on the Euro is certainly better this morning than what it has been about next week. Hoping it stays that way.
“As I write this it is 5:15 am ET in the Orlando airport, and I am awaiting an early morning flight back to Houston. I’ve been up all night…”
Gonzo journalism from Berger!
Minus the warm December, this is looking much more like the winters we used to get in the 70s and 80s.
7AM surface temperature is still above freezing on Jan 20 – model projected coldest morning. So no plan to bring anything in yet that I just put back outside. The in-ground “annuals” have survived… so far the warmest winter in several years. Yes Tina I know it’s a 7 days out run, so we’ll keep watching.
I’m keeping the plants in my garage too, got a little grow light set up and the plants seem pretty happy
Not to put more stuff on your plate, but is there any chance you could add a blurb in the coming days about what kind of weather Texans fans should be expecting in Kansas City on Saturday afternoon?
Also, sorry about the New Glenn launch being postponed. That would’ve been cool to see.
The iPhone weather app has been bullish on a hard freeze for next Monday/Tuesday, while weather.com has us staying in the 30s. We’ll see how it shakes out.
Yeah what’s up with that??! All the conflicting info is maddening.
No one should trust any model that states it has certainty around what temps will be like seven days from the present. It’s less about meteorology and more about people’s unreasonable expectations.
If you want to get the forecast directly from the source go to the Tropical Tidbits website and click on the “forecast models” icon. From there you can get thermodynamics or precipitation forecast from the two major computer models the GFS and the Euro. Past about 7 days or so they are not very accurate so that is why there are differences in the forecast. As we get within five days their accuracy improves dramatically. It’s fun to play around with if you are a weather nerd or work outside and depend on the weather to make a living.
Thanks! I’ll check that out 👍🏻
Thought of you this morning when I heard the launch was scrubbed. It would have been quite something to see.
Been checking MSN Weather daily, specifically the horizontal Temperature graph – you can slide it left and right to watch the projected temps (slide up and down and …) for the next 10 days.
On Sat 18th at 6am, the low is 60F. However …
Not too happy about next week’s prediction for lows here in Magnolia. On Tue 21st at 6am, it shows a low of 19°F (yea, nineteen) and a high of 39. For Wed 22nd at 5am, the low shows 20 and a high of 44 👎
weather dot com and accuweather both are predicting temps in the 20s
Ugh yes the 12 Zulu run shows hard freeze M-W….oh well. We’ll see if that verifies. Still bouncing models at 7-10 days out. Mr Berger is correct. Too soon to write it in! I agree with the others these potential polar breakouts due to warming seem annual now.
As long as Ted Cruz isn’t sighted at the airport this weekend, I’m cool with next week.
Clever. Haven’t heard that one before
I find it curious that the two richest men on the planet are busy flying rockets off the planet – although, both seem to be somewhat off the planet anyway.
One-wannabe-Ups-ManShip
Sorry that Blue was scrubbed.
Eric can you please address the horrifying contention that global warming is causing BOTH hotter heat waves and colder arctic blasts? The least one could ask for if summers are no longer going to be fit for gardening is that winters be more hospitable for plants. I have been waiting about 5 years for my banana tree to produce and every winter we have another hard freeze!
There isn’t quite enough evidence yet to fully conclude that global warming will certainly cause harsh cold snaps more often. While cold snaps have increased in North America in recent years, globally, they have gone down since the 70s and 80s.
Here in SE Texas, we used to get hard freezes almost every winter back in the 1970s and 80s. We had a mild period in the 90s and 2000s, but the hard killing freezes have been coming back over the past decade with the frequency they used to decades ago. Historically speaking, harsh coldsnaps in our region really aren’t anything out of the ordinary. We are just living in an active period right now.
However, global warming will and is certainly increasing the severity, duration, and frequency of heatwaves, which will continue to cause more stress to agriculture and more heat related casualties.
Perhaps. But it is a very slow process. ‘Will and is’ …are not so certain as those conclusions are from modeling. At least 2 major transient shocks to the heat balance occurred since 2020 – rather muddy waters for model initialization and boundary conditions.
I actually agree with you on that. There will always be natural variations that can delay or even temporarily reverse warming trends. I do not believe that the entire Earth will be a fiery hellscape in 20 years, as some overdramatic news articles will have you believe. However, there has been a steady, gradual upward trend in temperatures that will unfortunately cause many problems in the distant future if the issue causing the warming isn’t addressed in the near future.
Law of Rhythm (5th Hermetic) – the Earth’s atmosphere is trying to balance out the temperature differentials to re-establish a theoretical equilibrium
A major issue with the climate changing is surely the over population of earth, with some 9 billion and counting there will be soon be more people on the planet than Berger’s buddy Musk has dollars.
It wasn’t that long ago when there were only half that number of people inhabiting this world yet so called un-developed countries are having babies at an exponential rate – babies they cannot grow enough food to feed.
Unless we tackle the very serious issues leading to an uncontrollable warming and burgeoning planet, the future for those who come after us looks very bleak indeed.
Thank you! I have been saying this for a long time. Overpopulation is definitely a contributing factor to not only climate change but also the destruction of natural habitats for most other species, which also hurts us more in the long run. The Earth is a huge place with seemingly endless resources, but the resources are still finite.
They are projecting the world population to be 9.7 billion by 2050. Eventually, it will be 20 billion and 50 billion. When will it be enough? The more the population grows, the more natural forests will be knocked down for housing and farmland to feed the unlimited-growing population. There won’t be enough fresh water on Earth to supply everyone, and freshwater will become harder to come by anyways due to the increased heat and droughts that will plague the planet. In the future, we will probably resort to wars over basic resources needed to survive, like water, food, fertile farmland, etc..
So you are saying that Thanos is the hero?
Yes I am the hero 😎
The problem is not the amount of people. It is their lifestyle, values, and (anti)culture that is destroying the environment.
Earth’s population growth is slowing and will slow further or stop before long anyway. I read an article recently arguing that God has so designed the world that modernity naturally self-destructs by ceasing to have children. We in the developed world no longer value children highly enough to accept the difficulties that come with them, causing a population crash and the end of modern civilization. Of course, climate change or one of the other problems the modern world has caused could also end up bringing about the same result, most likely causing humanity to return to a world more like the middle ages. According to the argument, God does not want us to live in the modern world, he would rather us live in a world where children die of illnesses than in one where they are killed in the womb by other human beings.
I think I agree.