Quote:
Originally Posted by Hill Country
Huh? The winters are freaking awesome here. I have over 30 palm trees in my yard, and I enjoy the winters much more than the six-month summers. Of course it's all based on life experience. I've spent most of my life living in Michigan and Minnesota. So I have a different perspective than someone from Miami or Honolulu would have.
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The reality is that winters in Austin (and the country in general) are highly variable, depending on hemispheric patterns, including El Nino and La Nina. Some winters in Austin are consistently sunny with highs in the 60s and 70s (with some excursions to the 80s and even 90), with cool to somewhat cold nights. Other winters, like 2013-2014, are pretty awful, with days on end of heavy coat weather, icing/sleet, and overcast/fog, but with some nice days, too. Some winters have a few days with highs only in the 20s. I would say that long term, most winters are pretty nice, but some are pretty awful overall. Notorious winters included 1973, 1978 (probably the worst), 1983 (pools froze in Austin and people were ice skating on Bachman Lake in Dallas in December), 1985 (an unusual amount of snow, including 10 inches in far south Austin metro), 1989 (a low of close to zero at the old airport, and below zero on the west side of Austin in late December), 2011 (same period that Dallas had the awful Superbowl weather) and 2013-2014. But even the "bad" winters had a number of nice days where you could go out in shorts. So it's really difficult to generalize. And some of the nicest winters have had a couple of days of damaging ice storms. A few years ago we had a day in December when the high was about 80 but by 8 p.m. it was snowing after an arctic front barreled through. It was crazy.
I know that winters further north are far, far colder. I'm just trying put some perspective on the reality of weather in Austin, just for informational purposes.