Weather

I am a weather junkie... I love to watch the Weather Channel, and look at the predictions made by the experts, and compare them to what I think will happen based on the satellite pictures, what I see in the sky, and, what I know about Lubbock weather.  And, knowing the patterns in Lubbock, sometimes I am more correct than the experts, which is always a gas for me! 

Living in West Texas is a blessing for weather junkies: It is so wide open, you can SEE the weather moving in.  It is so totally awesome.  And the variety of weather we have is just amazing:   Lots of sunshine.  But we have tremendous straight line wind storms.  Tornadoes. Hail. Snow. Blizzards. Ice and sleet. Drought. Wind. Dust. Rain and flooding. Wind. Fog. Electric storms. Wind. Mud storms.  Oh, and did I mention the wind?

Until you live here, the force and effect of the wind is not imaginable... The wind can be so strong it HOWLS through the wires and branches of the trees. It takes your breath away. Sometimes,  it is almost impossible to walk into the wind.  It grabs you.. It grabs your car door, and jerks it off the hinges.  It overturns 18 wheelers.  It blows trees over.  

It is impossible to imagine what a dust storm is like.  And, we are blessed.  I have been in Lubbock 32 plus years, and the longest dust storm was three days...Can you even imagine what it was like during the years of the Dust Bowl? When you are driving, you can not see, but it is dangerous to stop on the road side, because someone might run into you... The dust can sandblast the paint on a vehicle, and pit the windshield. I have seen the dust roll in black.

Flooding occurs because there is no place for the water to drain...Everything is flat, and so once a playa lake or "bar ditch" has breached it's bank, the water just spreads out everywhere.  

Most of the time, if there is a serious rain, the next day the sun comes out and dries everything out... Even if there is flooding, sometimes within hours of the rain's end, the streets are dry...

This year has been unusual.  We had a big snow at Christmas.  Most of the time, snow melts the next day, but this time, I still had snow on my lawn into January...

The storm of January 28 and 29 saw the ice and snow stay for many days...

Recently, we have had several days of frozen fog...And the moisture does not evaporate from the ground.  There are actually puddles lasting several days: unheard of... Most puddles disappear within HOURS. 

We can go for almost a year without any appreciable rain.  We can have long stretches of above 100 weather in the summer.

This is a land of extremes...