Zoomin’ with Zoe: Texas region records all-time, hottest winter temp in the U.S.

By CBS Bay Area

“Zoomin’ with Zoe” focuses on notable features in the weather, and this week, meteorologist Zoe Mintz is taking a look at the warmest winter temperature ever recorded in the United States. 

On Feb. 26, the U.S. didn’t just observe the first triple-digit temperatures of the year, but the warmest, all-time winter temperature on record, and it wasn’t in Arizona. It happened in a place you might not expect – Let’s zoom to South Texas. 

The Falcon Dam weather station along the Rio Grande in southeastern Texas recorded a preliminary temperature of 106 degrees, making it the hottest ever temperature felt during the winter months. The previous record wasn’t far away. It reached 104 degrees in Rio Grande City, Texas, in 1902. 

And record warm winter days will likely become more common in the future, especially in Texas. If the climate were stable, half of all temperature records broken in a year would be record hot, half would be record cold, similar to back in 1960.

But as the planet continues to warm, record-breaking heat will become more frequent and intense compared to record cold.

Over the last 50 years, that trend has been seen in Laredo, TX, just north of where the record heat was felt this year. Laredo has also seen an average of four additional extremely warm winter days per year since 1970. 

Back in the Bay Area, San Jose actually saw the second-largest increase in unusually warm days out of over 200 U.S. cities analyzed by Climate Central. 

The Bay Area’s threshold for extremely warm weather is a lot lower than in Texas, but San Jose will have an average of 13 additional days each winter where temperatures will be above 67 degrees.