Dwight Silverman

What’s that you say? We haven’t had an SCW Q&A since April? Well, as they used to say in that old Wolf Brand Chili commercial, that’s too long!

In this installment, we tackle your questions about “classic” Houston summer weather, fall front enthusiasm, variable houmidity, whether a slow hurricane season means more intense storm next year, and tropical storm directions. Got a question of your own, drop it in our contact form!

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Q. I moved to Houston in 1995 and have lived here ever since. My memory from when I moved here is that summer days typically were hot, but that we often a short period of thunder and rain in the afternoon. My recollection is that this pattern was the ‘norm’ that was to be expected during the peak of the summer. We don’t seem to see that pattern so much now? I would be interested in your observations on this. Thanks for the great work you do, I have recommended SCW to so many people!

A: In my 14 years in Houston, I have heard this a lot. In fact, I remember last summer when people were quite pleasantly surprised by the seemingly daily storms, calling it almost a “throwback” summer. But do the numbers bear that out?

Well, in Houston it’s tough to truly measure the typical daily storms because, as everyone likes to joke, it can be raining on one side of the street and not the other. So what’s the best way to look at this statistically? Let’s start by look at the number of days in the summer months (which I’ll define as May through September) where rain occurs. We’ll look at both Hobby and Bush (which has an added record of threaded data back to 1950 for the “Houston area.”)

A couple things stand out. First, you can see some of the drought years for sure. You also see those mid-2010s years where Houston got blasted. But, both trendlines are upward pointing, Hobby more so than Bush. This means we’re seeing more rain days, sort of.

If we shave off 1950-1969 and just run both 1970 through 2025 (since 2026 isn’t over), where both airports were operating together, there’s actually a slight downward trendline at Bush. I also shaved off May and changed the threshold to a “trace” of rain because we really don’t get into the “daily storm” pattern until sometime in June typically and nearby storms often produce trace amounts of rainfall.

What I suspect is happening? There could be a degree of variability here with some areas turning wetter with time and others less so. As the Gulf has warmed in the last 20 years or so, we may be seeing a different pattern of daily storms as the sea breeze comes in each day. Obviously, these are untested hypotheses, but it is interesting to see that sort of differential compared to the longer-term record.

–Matt

Q. Eric, it seems like your enthusiasm for the years first front has waned compared to previous years. I may be jumping the gun and maybe you don’t start talking about them until mid September, but it concerns me. Do you know something that I and the little more than average lover of meteorology don’t?

A. If readers know one thing about me, it’s that I love a good fall cool front. We started Fall Day at Space City Weather to celebrate this very thing! However, I’m also rather wary of over-promising and under-delivering on cool fronts when it comes to our readers. So I’m not going to mention the possibility of something happening unless I think there’s at least a decent chance of it happening.

Anyway, my general rule is to not even utter the words “cool” and “front” together on the website until after Labor Day because August fronts are super rare. Well, we’ve just gotten past Labor Day. And happily, some of our models are showing the possibility of a front toward the end of next week. Rest assured you can expect daily updates on this, the most important of Houston news at this time of year.

-Eric

Q: Even when there is a lot of humidity (houmidity?) in the forecast, it always seems to drop some in the afternoon, but at night it goes back up through the morning. Why?

A: For this, you have to look at two variables. Remember, relative humidity, which you see usually labeled on the news or in your app as just “humidity” (or houmidity) is a relative measurement of humidity. Relative to what? The moisture (water vapor) in the air relative to the maximum amount of moisture it can hold.

There’s a number of ways to think about this, but the I find that the easiest is to think about air temperature and dewpoint. Dewpoint is the temperature that the air would need to cool to to reach saturation. We also know that the warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold. During the day, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere isn’t changing a ton. Sure, dewpoints may drop from something like 76 in the morning to 70 in the afternoon. But what else happens during the day? It heats up. Let’s take a recent non-rain day, August 30, as an example.

On August 30th, you can see how dewpoint was pretty steady more of the day, with minimal variability. As temperatures began warming, just after 7 AM, the relative humidity began to drop. Humidity was its lowest at the hottest point in the day. Then, after sunset, as temperatures cooled closer to the dewpoint, the relative humidity began to shoot upwards again. This is one reason why we argue that dewpoint is generally a superior metric to relative humidity for determining comfort. I don’t think we’d call it comfortable at 5 PM, but the air is holding less moisture, relative to the morning hours. So there’s your lesson on humidity!

-Matt

Q: Very happy that, so far, hurricane season has mostly been a bust for us. Keep it that way. I know that storms can cool down oceans as they churn cooler water to the surface. Does a slow hurricane season mean the oceans stay hot and the next year’s season could be more severe?

A: The simple answer is no. The more complex answer is that while hurricanes do help redistribute warmer air from the tropics to the poles and do churn up subsurface cooler water when they pass (upwelling), this is generally a temporary and localized effect. What will dictate the subsequent hurricane season’s activity and water temperatures is more related to larger scale patterns across the tropical basin of the Atlantic or global influences (like El Niño). The tendency is to move onto the next season, but at this point, it’s tough to say anything meaningful about the 2027 hurricane season, and I would not worry about “paying” for a quieter season this year. Variability is the norm.

-Matt

Q. Both tropical storms Bertha and Edouardo seemed to follow the same path this year, headed west along the upper Gulf coast and into SE Texas. Is this east-to-west path unusual, or even unusual to happen twice in one season.

A. It is rather odd that in a quiet Atlantic hurricane year, three of the five named storms have decided to visit the upper Texas coast. That’s a very high strike rate, and we can be grateful that, some flooding issues aside, these were non-stalling storms that did not turn into hurricanes.

As for their movement, what we observed is not overly unusual. Tropical storms tend to move from east to west in the latitudes of the Gulf, and will do so until they find a weakness in high pressure to their north. Once they do so they will indeed move north, and then become pulled northeast as they reach the mid-latitudes and are influenced by winds known as “westerlies” which, perhaps not surprisingly, blow from west to east.

-Eric

Welcome to the April 2026 edition of our occasional SCW Q&A series. This version features one of our most-asked questions: What can we expect from the forecast El Niño coming our way?

Got questions of your own for future installments? Drop them in the Weather Talk category on our Discourse forum, at the Contact form on the blog’s homepage, or in the comments on this post.

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Q. What is the expected effect of the predicted super El Niño (predicted to be the strongest in 150 years) on the Houston area for this summer and going into 2027? Will we see more rain? If so, when will such a pattern start? It seems we have been so dry for 4-5 years now.

A. We are now reasonably confident that El Niño will develop this summer, and strengthen as we head in to this fall and winter. Whether it becomes a super El Niño, well, we don’t know for sure. But it is quite possible. As for this summer there probably will be some tailwind effect pushing temperatures upward (we are already expecting a moderately warmer than normal summer). I am also hopeful that a developing El Niño will suppress some hurricane activity this season. We’ll have more to say about that in the coming weeks, but at this point it does not look to be a super-active season.

Then, as we get into the fall and winter, my sense is that with a strong El Niño in place we could see a reasonably wet season. However this is far enough into the future that I’m not sure we can really be confident about that. Unfortunately, what I am fairly confident in is that, should we get a super El Niño this summer and fall, its impacts will linger into 2027. This is likely to make for a very hot year for the globe, including summer in Houston next year.

– Eric

Q. I have always wondered what a capping inversion is. It seems to happen fairly often.

A. It does indeed! We often refer to a capping inversion on Space City Weather, but don’t always explain what it means. The concept is quite simple. For showers and thunderstorms to form the warm, moist air at the surface needs to rise several thousand feet and form clouds. If there is warmer air aloft in the atmosphere, this acts as a lid and prevents air from rising. (There’s a nice National Weather Service video showing this in practice on Facebook). This is the “cap.”

Atmospheric “soundings” are a really useful tool for meteorologists to get a vertical profile of the atmosphere, allowing us to determine when there is, and is not a cap. Unfortunately for Houston, there are a lack of good sounding locations (usually gathered by a weather balloon) nearby. Often times on a summer day, the difference between no rain and strong thunderstorms is whether this cap is strong enough to hold on, or erodes throughout the day. This lack of good nearby soundings is another reason why forecasting rainfall locally in Houston is a challenge.

– Eric

Q.  I have no meteorological background and am basing this purely off observation but over the last couple of years, or longer, it has seemed that there has been significantly more rainfall in the northern part of Houston/Woodlands/Conroe than in the southern, specifically in the greater SW Houston.  It’s almost as if I-10 has some kind of invisible wall. I’ve lived in the greater Houston area my whole life, the last 16 being in Sugar Land. Is there any veracity to this observation or am I just jealous of not getting the rainfall I need for my lawn and garden?

A. I am sorry to say, my jealous friend in Sugar Land, that I believe it is the latter. I should say, I often feel the same way about the area of town I live in, southeast of Houston. It will seem like it is raining everywhere but my neighborhood and this feels very bad. But this, almost certainly, is bias. (For example, the next time it is raining at your house, check the radar to see who is missing out!)

To put a little data to this question, let’s take a look at “percent of normal” rainfall totals for the state of Texas over the last five years. Basically, we can see, for areas from The Woodlands to Galveston pretty much everyone has received 80 to 100 percent of normal rainfall levels. If you squint the Fort Bend County has done a little worse than most.

If we look at just the last 12 months, the story is pretty much the same. Areas north of Houston, generally, have gotten a little more rainfall on a “normal” basis compared to southern areas. But it’s not super significant and everyone has gotten a fair amount of precipitation.

Finally, let’s look at raw rainfall totals over the last five years (below). We can see that the real gradient in rainfall amounts is more of an east-to-west one rather than a north-to-south one. What this reveals is that areas west of Houston, including Fort Bend County, are climatologically a little bit drier than areas to the south and east of the city. This is primarily due to Gulf proximity. Anyway the bottom line is that all of this is mostly psychological.

-Eric

Q. Will the Gulf of Mexico ever cool down? And what would it take for it to cool down? Or will it never cool down until the next ice age?

A: The Gulf has indeed been running hot. Most global oceans have, but we’re seeing a little bit of easing back of that this year. Still, relative to what is the best normal we have from satellite data (since the late 70s), the Gulf is the warmest it has been.

In the above chart from the University of Arizona, the blue line is in the middle of the pack for above normal water temperatures, but you can see that 2024 and 2025 were setting numerous daily records too. What we’ve sort of seen with the Gulf is a minor warming in the summer in the last 20 to 30 years but a more substantial warming in the fall, winter, and (as shown below) spring. Essentially what seems to be happening is that as our winters, springs, and autumns have warmed, the Gulf has not cooled off as much as we used to see historically.

It pains me to type this, but what would cool down the Gulf of Mexico? The only two logical things that could do it are time or a very large and intense hurricane traversing the middle of the Gulf. Let’s take a look at the most potent Gulf hurricane season in recent memory: 2020. We’ll subtract the November through June sea surface temperatures from the following period (November 2020 through June 2021) just as an example. You’d expect the Gulf to be notably cooler. And it is quite a bit cooler.

But also keep in mind, the Gulf is a curious body of water with very shallow shelf waters and very deep offshore waters. The shelf waters are prone to a lot of fluctuations month to month and year to year, and they’ll respond more to how the seasons perform (colder winters –> colder shelf waters, etc.). But ultimately, what has happened is that the floor on how cool the Gulf can get has likely been raised due in part to climate change. I know a handful of readers don’t want to read that, but that’s the reality. And this is one of the clearest signs of climate warming there is in my opinion because of what has been observed with coral reefs in particular.

So the frustrating answer is that it’s probably going to be warm for a while, at least until we actually get a legitimately sustained cold winter in the Southeast, not just a couple one-off stronger events. Or until we have another active hurricane season. I hope it’s not the latter.

–Matt

Q. Why does it always seem to rain on weekends? Your forecasts for fronts seem to consistently show non-rainy weekdays, with fronts moving through over the weekend. I know weeks and weekends are human things, not nature, but is there some kind of cycle that causes this? 

A. I love this question. Because it’s one of those things that sounds a little silly on the surface but people genuinely notice it and are curious. And the reality is actually quite nuanced! So on the one hand, there’s no single mechanism that says cold fronts are going to hit only on Saturdays and Sundays. Our bigger events happen any day of the week. The 1992 November tornado outbreak happened on a Saturday. The 2023 Pasadena tornado happened on a Tuesday.

But! There are a couple ways of looking at this that make chemical and meteorological sense. First, as we all commute to work and school and drive around during the week, our cars, our work, etc. leads to a build-up of aerosols in the atmosphere. Those aerosols act as nuclei in the atmosphere for rain drops to form on. Once you get to the weekend, those aerosols are at their highest amount of the week, and thus you’ve tilted the odds a bit.

Or so that’s what is speculated on in a 1998 paper. That one focused mostly on the Northeast urban corridor. A subsequent paper in 2010 also looked into this across the entire U.S. and found that there remains a weekend pattern signal even when you remove human (anthropogenic) influences. In other words, there may be a naturally occurring cycle at play. Additionally, a 2003 paper looked into temperature patterns that also found a “weekend effect” that exists. There was also a 2011 paper that noted hailstorms and tornadoes tend to be less frequent on weekends.

But a lot of scientists have also poked holes in this research question, speculating experimental flaws, cognitive biases, etc. The reality is, we just don’t know. But here: I decided to look at Houston’s total rainfall since 2023. 38.72 inches fell on Saturdays and Sundays. 109.18 inches fell on weekdays. About a quarter of our precip since January 2023 has fallen on weekends, which makes up about 29 percent of the week. You could say I’m cherrypicking data here but at least in the last few years, there’s no statistic “weekend effect” in Houston. Still, there’s enough there there in some cases to continue researching the topic!

-Matt

Q. What should I be doing now to prep my home to get ready for summer and better manage my energy costs?

We’ll toss this one to our sitewide partner, Reliant, to weigh in.

A. With warmer days already settling in, now is a smart time to tackle quick home fixes that can improve efficiency and help limit cooling costs as temperatures continue to rise. Plus, as AC use ramps up earlier in the season, small, smart energy choices can help keep homes comfortable while managing monthly bills. Here are a few simple, cost‑conscious tips:

• Inspect ductwork for loose connections or damaged insulation as leaks can waste up to 30% of cooled air.
• Add more insulation, which is a critical component of home energy efficiency and can be among the most cost-effective improvements you can make.
• Replace or clean air filters every 30-60 days, as a clean filter can reduce AC energy consumption by up to 15 percent.
• Schedule a spring tune‑up to ensure the AC system is ready for high demand.
• Follow the 4×4 rule by raising your air conditioning temperature 4 degrees if you’ll be away from home 4 hours or more.
• Get ahead of the summer heat by investing in a smart thermostat, which helps make managing your home’s energy effortless and can lead to real savings when temperatures climb.

-Reliant

Time for yet another Q&A post, in which we answer your questions about area weather and Space City Weather itself. If you missed past Q&As, we keep an archive of them here. Submit your own questions via the Contact link on the blog’s home page, or post it to our Weather Talk topic on our Discourse forum.

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Q. Every year for the past 20 odd years I’ve been raking leaves on my property in North Houston and this would normally stop by mid January. It’s mid February and maples and water oaks are shedding like crazy, not to mention that it seems like the drought made pines start dropping their needles like a month earlier. What is going on!?

A. First of all, I’ve noticed this phenomenon as well this winter, and have wondered the same thing. Second, I am not an arborist (although I do love trees). However, I do think the weather is involved here, and probably explains what has happened.

Live oaks typically keep their leaves well into winter, as you note. Then, they finally drop their leaves just as new ones are ready to emerge. So why is it happening later this year?

I would go back to our very warm weather in December (especially the second half of the month), followed by similar conditions through the first three weeks of January. This led to a delayed drop. Then, I suspect the Arctic fronts in late January and early February were a shock, causing most of our trees to lose all of their leaves at once. Our region’s lingering drought may well have also played a role. When you’re done raking at your house, would you care to come to mine?

– Eric

Q. We appreciate and rely upon your succinct forecasting and reporting our weather. However, we are frustrated by your haphazard timing each morning. We need to have your forecast by 7 a.m. and some mornings we have it, but often we miss it.

A. The only thing a lot of people really need before 7 a.m. in the morning is coffee, but I take your point.

Over the years the time I’ve posted on Space City Weather has varied based on the time I needed to get up and write a forecast before dropping one or both of my girls at school. That generally was before 7 a.m. However they’ve both graduated now, so there’s no forcing factor. Sometimes I “sleep in” until 6:30 a.m. or so, and this causes the post to be published later in the morning. There are also some days when the forecast is really complex, and I spend a lot of time trying to really understand things before writing a word.

But these are excuses, and in reality you are not the only person who has asked for this. So dear reader, I will commit to trying very hard to get the daily posts out by 7 a.m. There may be some mornings when I’m traveling for my day job, or when life happens. And I am not going to commit Matt to this deadline because he still has young kids.

But most days we’ll hit ‘publish’ by or before 7 a.m.

– Eric

Q. As a meteorologist, the usage of AI to make slop art is pretty disappointing. I think the comments on your posts about it tell you everything.

A. Wait, did we receive some negative feedback for the use of this image? I’m kidding. There were lots of comments and concerns, so I want to explain why we did so, how we use AI, and to try and allay reader concerns.

We have used AI-created images (always clearly labeled as such) only seven times in the history of Space City Weather, but most recent time we did so came on February 5th, here. This was, by far, the most controversial time. I used the image that morning because it was a humorous post, and I wanted a similarly “fun” image. I thought the AI-created image really fit the tone of the post, so I ran with it. It was a spur of the moment decision. This did not put a graphic artist out of business. Had I not used the AI-generated image, I would have just used a standard weather map or something.

I feel very conflicted about artificial intelligence, and its increasing prominence in our lives. A line in a recent op-ed in the New York Times really resonated with me: “”All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it.” Basically, some of the most powerful business leaders in the world are aggressively pushing this stuff on us, and I don’t think they have our best interests at heart. I worry about the environmental implications. And I worry about the disruption to society a lot, and what the future is going to look like for my kids. So one one level, yes, I’m definitely uncomfortable with AI.

However, like it or not, this stuff is coming. And it behooves me—a perpetually online writer, forecaster, and journalist—to understand the technology and its implications. So yes, I experiment with AI tools and have found some utility in them. For forecasting, some of the AI-based weather models are quite good and Matt and I use them daily alongside traditional, physics-based models.

About one year ago we published an article outlining how Space City Weather will, and will not use AI. In that article, I wrote, “We have not, nor will we use any AI-based service for the writing of our forecasts. Very occasionally we may use an AI-based illustration, but if we do it will be clearly labeled as such.” That is the commitment we made to readers at the time, and we stuck with that, including our controversial use of an AI image a couple of weeks ago. However, I do want to reiterate that every word printed on this site in the past, today, and in perpetuity will be written by a human hand.

– Eric

Q. Houston’s such a big place, the weather is all over the place and yes, that pun was intended! Why do you only have 12 cities to pick from on your app? Why isn’t my city/town/neighborhood included?

A. Did you know that the city of Houston covers more than 600 square miles? It’s true! And that one of my favorite jokes about living here is that “Houston is an hour away from Houston”? “A big place” is something of an understatement …

This is one of our most-asked questions. When we first set out to build and release a mobile app for the site, we had to make some hard choices about which locations to include in the city picker (tap the 3-line menu on the upper left corner of the app’s home screen to see it). Eric and Matt tried to ensure that the region got wide-ranging coverage, but we only had five slots in the initial design. We were able to expand to a dozen in later updates, where we remain today.

Besides Eric’s & Matt’s judgement calls, there are some technical and design limitations. On most phones and tablets, we didn’t want to force users to scroll through a bunch of city names (though on smaller devices there may be a bit of a scroll), and we wanted to keep the app “lite.”

In addition, we use location-based conditions and forecast feeds from the National Weather Service, and if there is not a feed for a particular city, we can’t provide that data.

Your best bet if you don’t see your exact location in the picker is to choose the city closest to you. Yes, Houston’s spread out, but the weather source nearest you is very likely to have the conditions and forecasting info you need. For example, I live in the Montrose/River Oaks area, so I choose Hobby as my location. That works out pretty well.

And here’s a tip: The Houston item on the app’s list is Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), so if you live around there you can choose it. (IAH is also Houston’s “official” weather station.)

One of the other reasons for our current approach is that we don’t track anything you do in the app, and that includes location. But we are considering changing that – location tracking may be added to a future version of the app as an opt-in feature. If you wanted to know the conditions and forecast at your current location, this feature would do that. But again, it would be off by default.

Also, we are looking at the feasibility of adding cities for every available NWS feed and letting users pick their 12 cities – or letting the app choose for you based on location, if you opt-in. A big under-the-hood change planned for this year could enable that. These are all proposals, nothing yet set in stone; let’s just say it’s … aspirational!

As always, thank you for using the Space City Weather app on your iPhone/iPad/Mac or Android devices. And don’t forget we have a dedicated topic on our Discourse forum for talking about the app!

–Dwight

Q. I’ve been dealing with some serious allergies. Have you noticed any data showing a surge in allergens like pollen or cedar? Does this seem earlier than usual for the season, or could it be tied to that big temperature swing from the hard freeze to the 80s this week?

A. This question tends to come up each spring, or late winter as it is in Houston. Is allergy season starting earlier than it has? There’s some evidence in research that says this is occurring as the climate warms. But looking practically at recent data specifically in Houston, it’s a little more mixed. Tree pollen is considered high once levels hit about 80 or so. But the first really, really bad day of spring typically hits when we get to around a level of 500. If you’re curious, the worst day we’ve had since we’ve tracked this back to 2017 was April 7, 2022 when pollen levels exceeded 12,000!

So when has Houston hit that first “500” of the season?

2017: January 4 and again February 9
2018: January 12, 23, and February 2
2019: January 24, 29, and February 5
2020: January 27 and February 4
2021: January 7, several more times through Feb 1, then not again til mid-March
2022: February 18
2023: January 6, 13, 24, and February 7
2024: January 2 and February 1
2025: January 31 and February 10
2026: February 12

What can we make of this? Well, for one it seems like we almost always get 1 to 3 bad allergy days before February. Usually that’ll be a bunch of cedar blowing in behind a cold front with strong winds. But we don’t really see our true “season” establish until around the first week or two of February. From that point of view, this year seems to be right on time, if not perhaps a little late.

The glaring outlier is 2021, when the mid-February freeze likely caused enough damage to trees to keep pollen from becoming an issue again til March and April. But as you can see from the chart, we are quite early in the game. We haven’t seen anything yet, and it’s likely the next 2-6 weeks will be rough for seasonal allergy sufferers.

– Matt

Q. For a while there, it seemed like Houston had a flood every year, sometimes more than one. That seems to have faded in the past few years. Is there a bigger-picture thing happening, or is it just the roll of the weather dice?

A. If you look at the history of Houston flood events, you’ll find a mix of all sorts of years and event types that triggered them. In some ways 2015 (Memorial Day) and 2016 (Tax Day) were just dumb luck thunderstorm events. Neither were “freak,” per se, but they had a sense of randomness to them.

Then, in 2017 Harvey was caused by a remnant hurricane and 2019 was a stalled out tropical storm (Imelda). You are correct that since then, things have tended to be a little calmer. Since 2019, Houston has only had one year of above average rainfall (2024), and of course that was tied heavily to one event (Beryl) and an active spring thunderstorm season. So just generally speaking, we’ve been drier than usual, reducing the overall odds of rain events.

Also, keep in mind that Houston is merely a dot on a map. Regionally, there have been some bad flooding events since our bad luck finally eased up. News of the recent massive expansion in floodplain coverage across Harris County, however, should give us all pause that while we’ve been more than deserving of a few years of calm, the pendulum will one day swing back again.

– Matt