In brief: We’re interrupting your weekend because our confidence is increasing that a front arriving on Sunday morning will bring sharply colder temperatures on Sunday night into Monday morning. It now appears likely that much of the region will fall near to freezing, or a few degrees below.
The vast majority of the Houston region has yet to experience a freeze this season—the lowest temperature so far at Bush Intercontinental Airport has been 37 degrees—but that could change on Monday morning. For several days now it has been clear that a short-lived, but impactful front will push into Houston on Sunday. Now that we are closer to the front, however, we are beginning to get high-resolution data that continues to trend colder. It is clear that much of Houston, even within the urban core of the city, could see a light freeze for a couple of hours on Monday morning.
This is not the kind of freeze that is likely to knock power offline, or freeze pipes. We just are not going to get that cold, for that long. But this will be the first freeze of the season for much of the greater Houston metro area, and that means care should be taken for sensitive plants, and of course you should think about your pets.
We still don’t have great confidence of where the freeze line will fall, but I am reasonably confident that a majority of Montgomery and Chambers counties will freeze early on Monday morning. And I now think there is probably about a 50 percent chance that the majority of Harris County experiences a freeze. Chances are less likely for Galveston, Brazoria, and Fort Bend counties, but basically we’re not ruling anything out except for a place like, say, Galveston Island.
We will warm up into the low 50s on Monday, and Monday night should be at least a few degrees warmer. So the cold won’t last too long. And then we’re going to be quite a bit warmer for the run-up to Christmas morning.
