There was a moment, sometime in July, when it looked like Austin would get off easy for a change.
Unseasonably heavy rains into the summer kept temperatures below the expected summer scorch. Even area reservoirs were recovering. Maybe this year, people thought, we’d escape the brutal heat that has characterized recent years.
Then came the fall. September was one of Austin’s driest and hottest in 126 years of record keeping. October was even worse.
By midday on Halloween, it appeared that Austin’s daily high temperatures for October would average out to 91.6 degrees.
“This blows away the previous record high of 88.4F set in 1947,” Victor Murphy, a Climate Services program manager, at the National Weather Service, wrote to KUT.
October nights did cool off a bit, thanks to low humidity brought by a near complete absence of rain. But those nights, on average, were still much warmer than usual. They were the fifth warmest lows on record to be exact.
Put those average highs and lows together, and we just lived through the warmest October ever recorded.
With a mean temperature of around 78.2, Murphy said, this October was 6.4 degrees warmer than normal, and exceeded the previous record of 77 degrees Fahrenheit set in 1931 by 1.2 degrees.
In fact, this October was so hot that, looking back at the historical data, a quarter of all Septembers in Austin have been cooler than this recent October.
The high temperatures are in keeping with long term trends, brought by the burning of fossil fuels, that will continue to make Texas hotter and hotter, according to the Office of the State Climatologist.
While some rain is forecast for the area over the next several days. The longer-term outlook is less promising, with a weak La Niña climate pattern making a drier and warmer winter more likely in Texas.
