2025 is off to a crazy start when it comes to weather. As fires raged in LA, the Southeast was dealing with the opposite problem: a blizzard that brought record-breaking levels of snow to a region that often goes years without receiving a single flake.
On January 20th, dangerously cold temperatures were felt as far south as northeast Mexico during a hard freeze event in the Rio Grande Valley. By the 21st, lows had dropped into the 20s and 30s, with wind chills making it feel much colder. For example, in Encino, TX on January 21st, the minimum temperature was 28 degrees, but the minimum “feels-like” temperature was 16 degrees. The next morning, actual temperatures would dip into the teens in some places.
On the night of the 20th, snow started to fall in Texas, and one-day snowfall records were broken across the state. A record-shattering 4.5 inches accumulated in southeastern Texas’s Port Arthur-Beaumont region. The storm continued to grow as it moved eastward along the Gulf Coast. The state’s first ever blizzard warnings were issued in Louisiana. New Orleans got 10 inches of snow, and a jaw-dropping 11.5 inches fell in Chalmette, a city in the New Orleans metropolitan area. In Lafayette, LA, temperatures plummeted to 4 degrees fahrenheit, the lowest temperature ever recorded since logs began in 1893.
As the storm pushed east, it continued to break records in Mississippi, Alabama, and northern Florida. On social media, photos went viral of Gulf Coast beaches covered in snow; vast expanses of white sharply contrasting with turquoise-blue subtropical waters. 7.5 inches were recorded in Mobile, Alabama (yet another broken record), and a whopping 10 inches fell in Pensacola, Florida. That day, Florida experienced the snowiest day ever recorded in the history of the state. The storm continued northeast, coating parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia in a blanket of white.
The amount of records broken during this storm is astounding. As shown in a map created by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), one-day snowfall records were shattered across the Southeast from Texas to North Carolina. In some places, records were broken by trace amounts of snow (about 0.1 inches). However, as previously mentioned, many places received much more. Some areas received so much snow that, at the time, they had gotten more snow this winter than Chicago and NYC.
So what exactly caused this record-breaking blizzard? In their article, NOAA attributes it to a few different weather phenomena that amalgamated into the perfect storm. You might have heard of the lake effect, which is when cold air moves over relatively warm waters in the Great Lakes, pushing moisture into the lowest parts of the atmosphere and concentrating clouds into narrow bands that produce large amounts of snow extremely quickly. NOAA believes that last month’s storm was the result of a southern version of this effect. Moisture was pushed north from the Gulf of Mexico over the southern states, and this collided with a stretch of cold and dry arctic air, also known as an “arctic blast”, that was lingering over the region.
It is also possible that climate change played a role in this weather event. The arctic blast was a result of a southern dip in the jet stream, which was closely tied to a stretch in the stratospheric polar vortex, which is a large patch of air over the arctic that is typically contained by jet stream winds. Some scientists hypothesize that these stretching events, which push the jet stream southward and in turn cause more arctic blasts, are in part caused by melting sea ice.
It’s important to note that this snowstorm does not provide evidence against climate change. Many people have heard of climate change referred to as “global warming”. This term is misleading because, while climate change is associated with a general increase in temperatures, it also causes more extreme weather events to become more frequent, and this sometimes includes unusually cold weather such as the southern snow storm.
Ice accumulates on a fence and tree branches in Zapata County, Texas, on January 21st during the Rio Grande Valley’s freeze event.
Florida’s Gulf Coast is blanketed in snow.
New Orleans resident Eric Walker holds a snowball fight.
A map created by NOAA shows all the places that broke their one-day snowfall record during last month’s storm.