Why Houston missed the storm bullet Thursday morning

HOUSTON – A line of strong to severe storms moved in from the north Wednesday evening, impacting our northernmost counties up in the Brazos Valley. I know this, as I was at my apartment in College Station as the line rolled through, creating gusty conditions and frequent lightning.

As the storms continued to push south, they fell apart before reaching Houston.

The big question is “WHY”?

Well, look no further! Here’s a deep dive into why Houston missed out on the storm activity Thursday morning.

The ingredients:

I’m sure you’ve all heard one of us on the weather team talk about the “ingredients” needed for storms and even severe storms to form.

For normal storms, those ingredients include lift – frontal or orographic, moisture – typically from the Gulf with continued southerly flow, and instability – how much energy or how unstable the air is above you.

For severe storms, the ingredients are the same, but you add shear to the mix. Shear is when winds change speed and direction with height.

Now, we have PLENTY of these ingredients in place for Thursday, but there’s one thing that kept the storms from making it to Houston. So, what happened?

The “Cap”:

This brings us to the “cap”. Think of the “cap” as a Topo Chico bottle. You have your liquid (the ingredients mentioned above), inside of the bottle, and the cap keeps those ingredients from spilling out.

This is essentially what the “cap” does in the atmosphere, which kept the storms from moving into our area.

Our “cap” came in the form of warmer temperatures aloft. This limits cloud growth in the atmosphere, and in turn, it will impact the severity of storms or whether storms will even make it over an area.

Normally in the atmosphere, we see temperatures decreasing with height, as air parcels warmer than the surrounding air can lift more easily, condense, and lead to cloud formation.

This can then lead to cloud growth until we eventually get precipitation.

We noticed this as the storms that should have moved into our area on the tail end of the line, fizzled out as the “cap” on the atmosphere over Houston was stronger, which kept storms from reaching our area.

If you also noticed, the storms that continued to rage on also took a hard right turn, moving closer to the Texas/Louisiana border.

The cold front behind the storms started speeding up in the northern quadrant as they headed east, which pushed those storms quickly out of our area.

We still have another chance of storms on Thursday and the highest chance on Friday.