Winter storm warnings span much of the Gulf Coast

AccuWeather

From Texas to Florida, people spent Jan. 20 preparing for historic wintry weather.

Transcript

00:00it's it's actually turning out to be a ghost town here they have

00:03uh they're tightening things up as we speak and they're expecting everybody to

00:06be off the roads here by the time night falls now over my

00:09shoulder of course you can see they have some

00:12plants here that they've covered for tonight anticipating

00:15those bitterly cold temperatures and as we head into

00:19the overnight that's overnight that's when of course we're going to get this

00:22winter snow mix and folks here again advised to

00:26stay off these roads if they can there's also hotels

00:29here that have also covered up their sensitive plants and

00:32i listened to an interview with the mayor just a few minutes ago and he was

00:36saying he's really proud of the houstonians here he thinks that they've

00:39done a great job trying to prepare for this event i was

00:43at the george bush international airport of course

00:45earlier today i flew in there from florida and things were running pretty

00:50smoothly i must say there was not really terribly long lines in the

00:55security checkpoints of course you're always going to get that but it looked

00:57like things were running smoothly there were some flight

01:01delays i did check with flight aware just a couple of minutes ago

01:04uh there have been delays throughout the day here in the houston area but not

01:08bad now tomorrow of course we're anticipating

01:11both the airports here in the houston area to be closed

01:15because they will not be able to uh you know get the

01:18planes in and out of here safely so folks i know we're trying to

01:21rearrange some tickets i ran into some people that were coming back from a

01:25cruise in florida and they uh were not too happy that they

01:28just left a beautiful a warm paradise and they're back into

01:32this cold weather i will say that uh we also when we were

01:35driving around erin j jack and i have been driving around today

01:38uh we did see some of the roadways trying to get prepared so i do think

01:42they are trying to do that here and mitigate

01:44some of that uh ice and of course some of that snow

01:47that they're anticipating tomorrow this historic snow that

01:50houston has not seen the last time they had a really significant snow was in

01:561960 they have had snow since then but a really big snow

01:59and their largest most highest record was in the 1800s where they had

02:04almost two feet 20 inches to be exact they're expecting

02:07snow on the beaches here tomorrow it is going to be a

02:10no doubt a pretty crazy scene here for houston but they're doing their best and

02:14and hopefully everyone is ready we are reporting in

02:17downtown houston i'm leslie hudson for accuweather

02:21back to you well snow on the beach sounds pretty good to me but i think

02:25some texans might disagree with me i gather correspondent leslie hudson

02:29thank you for that update let's talk a little bit more about the

02:32forecast and what to expect there in houston especially uh we're already

02:37starting to see some of that moisture from the gulf

02:40moving in already seeing kind of that mix of some snow we're seeing some

02:43ice in there some of that pink but a lot of rain of course we do expect that to

02:47switch over to more of that ice and more of the snow

02:50as we go into the overnight hours and because of that we have a lot

02:54of alerts out winter storm warnings winter weather advisories

02:57all issued across the gulf coast here just to make sure people understand

03:02this is a big deal this is something you should be preparing for just like

03:06you see the crews on your screen there are preparing houston itself expecting

03:10to get two to four inches of snow and some ice accumulation not a good

03:14combination as far as the timing it's going to start 9 p.m tonight

03:17and then continue over into tomorrow afternoon around 3 p.m is when things

03:23should wrap up and these are the impacts that we're

03:26watching for interstate closures power outages

03:28and keep in mind the cold it's going to linger so it's not like the snow the ice

03:32is going to fall and the next morning it will have all

03:34melted no it's still going to be sticking around

03:37and with temperatures bouncing back and forth between you know above and below

03:41freezing refreeze is a concern where things start to

03:44melt and then they freeze again when maybe crews haven't salted again

03:48they're salting in preparation but maybe they haven't made it out ahead

03:51of the refreeze that's the type of situation we're watching for

03:54future radar shows how this is going to play out seeing this move

03:58in through texas into louisiana and continuing to move east

04:02and you see that mix there a lot of snow but we are seeing more of that pink

04:05we're seeing some heavy rain in here too in the alerts we do have some

04:09flood warnings out for some areas really near rivers where you know we're

04:14most at risk for some of that flooding let's take a look at our snow map

04:17quickly here one to three inches for a lot of us in that light blue

04:21but especially areas east of houston overlapping with i-10

04:24that's where we could see even a foot of snow

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