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Livestock Wx for Dec. 8, 2017:  Warm and dry in November, snow in South Texas in December… so what can we expect for January?
November was milder and drier than normal over Texas and Oklahoma and that might be mildly understating the situation. The image below shows just how mild and dry it was with temperature and precipitation anomalies (degree to which temperature and precipitation deviate from the 30-year average) well outside the norm.

The short-term outlook for December does not bring good news; however, we have started the month much colder than normal and we are even seeing snow in South Texas and along the Gulf Coast. This reminds us of the South Texas Christmas Miracle back in 2004 (a good children’s book by Clark Childers covers the 2004 event nicely) when Corpus Christi received over 4 inches of the frozen precipitation.
Unfortunately, the 6-10 day outlooks from NOAA show it will start warming up late next week and the 8-14 day outlooks (see image below) continues the momentum into the latter part of the month. While it’s never good to doubt Christmas miracles, it’s not looking good for another snow miracle in South Texas.

Drought Status
Over the past week dry or drought conditions have expanded over parts of South, Central, and East Texas while Oklahoma saw expansion in the Northwest and down into the central part of the state.
A new graphic we’re showing this week is the number of nonconsecutive weeks Texas and Oklahoma have been in either dry (D0) or drought (D1-D4) conditions since August.  This 18 week period shows areas that have been persistently dry such as Northwest Oklahoma, South Texas and the area around Texarkana.  These areas received good rainfall in August but largely missed out on much of the continued rainfall in September.

Just In: January Outlook
The new North American Multi Model Ensemble (NMME) long range outlook has just arrived. The NMME shows we may expect warmer and drier than normal weather in January.
If the dry and warm January outlook holds, the dry and droughty areas highlighted above will require monitoring going into spring.

New Sponsor
Finally, here at Livestock Wx we have a new sponsor. We would like to sincerely thank Hargrove Insurance for sponsoring these weekly articles.
If you have any questions about conditions around Texas and Oklahoma please contact us at info@livestockwx.com.