August in Houston concludes with milder weather, no named tropical storms entire month

August 2022 was an anomaly in the Houston area, with milder than usual temperatures and no named tropical storms for the region to worry about.

This August was the mildest August in 30 years, according to Eric Berger with Space City Weather. August was one and three degrees cooler than June and July, respectively.

“It did feel better because we had lots of clouds and rain and that kept the daytime temperatures cooler,” Berger said. “And really the other thing that we saw in August is this emerging drought. We had the goldilocks weather. There was just enough rain to kill the drought, but not too much rain to cause widespread flooding and it’s not easy to do that in August.”

Berger said a big reason that this happened was because high pressure began to “back off” during the first week of August.

“The big picture is when you have high pressure, that prevents air in the surface from rising. There’s plenty of moisture in the surface, but if that warm air moisture can’t rise and form clouds you’re just not going to get rain,” he explained. “High pressure started to back off the first week of August. It’s been gone for a few weeks. And we’ve seen a bit more moisture from the Tropics.”

But Berger said that doesn’t mean September won’t be busy when it comes to big storms. He said there are systems in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico that are starting to develop.

“The pattern over the next week to even potentially two weeks does look like as these storms form, they are going to be keeping away from land, so there’s no near-term threats to the United States or even the Caribbean Islands for the first half of September,” he said.

Berger said this season has caught a lot of experts by surprise. National hurricane forecasters predicted a busier than usual season. Instead, it was the first August in 25 years not to have a named storm develop out of the Atlantic.

But just because it was a quiet August, doesn’t mean the rest of hurricane season will be slow as well.

“The Houston area and Texas is at a real risk of a hurricane strike for about the month or so,” he said. “After that we get into fall and the real chance of a hurricane strike starts to recede. But right now we are in the prime time of hurricane season.”