There was a moment, sometime in July, when it looked like Austin was going to go easy for a change.
Unusually heavy summer rain kept temperatures below the expected summer heat. Even the region’s reservoirs were recovering. People thought that maybe this year we would escape the extreme heat that has characterized recent years.
Then autumn came. September was one of the driest and hottest months in Austin in 126 years of record keeping. October was even worse.
By midday on Halloween, it looked like Austin’s average daily high temperature for October would reach 91.6 degrees.
“This breaks the previous record of 88.4 degrees Fahrenheit set in 1947,” Victor Murphy, climate services program manager at the National Weather Service, wrote to KUT.
The October nights have softened a bit, thanks to the lower humidity resulting from the almost complete absence of rain. But those nights, on average, were still warmer than usual. It was the fifth-warmest low on record, to be exact.
Adding these highs and lows together, we just experienced the warmest October on record.
With an average temperature of about 78.2, this October was 6.4 degrees warmer than normal, surpassing the previous record of 77 degrees F set in 1931 by 1.2 degrees, Murphy said.
In fact, October this year was so hot that if we look at historical data, a quarter of all Septembers in Austin were cooler than last October.
The rising temperatures are consistent with long-term trends, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, that will continue to make Texas hotter, according to the state climatology office.
While rain is expected to fall in the area during the next few days. The long-term outlook is less promising, with a weakening La Niña climate pattern making winters drier and warmer in Texas.
