White Christmas in south Texas (and New Orleans?) 21 years ago

Seeing snow for the first time on Christmas morning was probably the coolest thing ever for middle school Lionward.

I was in high school in Corpus Christi and that was a wild Christmas!

Good memories.

South Padre Island Christmas morning 2004



Park across from my mom’s house

It was amazing. First time i had ever driven in snow coming back from a friend’s that night and they were definitely not prepared on the roads.

Born and raised in the same house in Patterson until I graduated HS. I had just turned ten that year. I told my parents I wanted snow that year for Christmas. I kept bringing it up and they kept telling me “well I wouldn’t get your hopes up.” My older sister told my mom she was going to pray for it to snow because she knew how bad I wanted it. Lo and behold the next morning we got the smallest dusting of that and ice. It wasn’t much but for me it may as well have been Aspen. Only thing that’s topped it for Christmas memories was seeing my almost two year old get excited seeing her presents this morning.

It snowed the last Christmas of real New Orleans. Katrina was 8 months later.

That shite was wild!!

I remember my wife talking to family in Bay City and they were having a white Christmas. It was nuts.

quote:

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We need to look back to the week before Christmas in order to recap the details of this historic event. Signals from the numerical weather forecast models suggested a strong cold front and arctic air mass would move southward along the Rocky Mountains into Texas and eventually over the Lower Texas Coast. This cold front moved through Brownsville, Wednesday afternoon (12/22/2004). A second reinforcing surge of arctic air followed the initial front, dropping temperatures into the 30s and low 40s late Thursday (12/23/2004). Maximum temperatures on Friday (12/24/2004) were in the upper 30s to low 40s across the Rio Grande Valley. Widespread moderate rain covered much of the area with most locations reporting one half of an inch to nearly one inch of liquid precipitation (Figure 1, below). The cold rain began to taper off on Christmas Eve as temperatures began to fall below freezing.

As the event began to unfold, the meteorologists at NWS Brownsville refined the precipitation forecast to account for rainfall changing to sleet or a rain/snow mix, and eventually changing to all snow for the overnight hours between December 24th and 25th. The first in a series of winter weather warnings and advisories - Freeze Warnings - were issued by the National Weather Service at 230 AM December 23rd. Around noon on Christmas Eve, the Freeze Warnings were upgraded to Winter Weather Advisories, which were subsequently upgraded to Winter Storm Warnings later that evening for Heavy Snow, continuing until the morning of December 25th when the snowfall finally ended.

With the cold air trapped at the surface and wedged against the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, an upper level low with Pacific moisture was moving east across Northern Mexico. The moisture and upward vertical motion generated by this upper level system caused snow to begin falling across Deep South Texas after 10 PM CST. The snow fall persisted through midnight (Figure 2) into Christmas morning and eventually ended around 4 AM on (12/25/2004) leaving behind the first White Christmas ever recording in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and most likely the first White Christmas ever in extreme Northeast Mexico.

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Basically a perfect storm





NWS report

the snow started falling during Midnight Mass in Houston.

The pastor had seen the weather report and cleverly worked snow into his homily.