![]() ![]() They determined that local temperatures and the corresponding demand for heating per capita across the region served by the Texas power grid were more severe during a storm in December 1989 than during this year’s storm, and that cold snaps in 19 were almost as severe. 13 and 17, temperatures dropped as low as 13 degrees F.ĭoss-Gollin and the other researchers computed a temperature-based model for heating demand and used it to ask what the aggregate demand for heating per capita would have been had historic cold snaps occurred with today’s population. More than 4.2 million people across the south-central states were left without power, more than 3.5 million of them in Texas alone. In other words, was it a ‘black swan’ that no one could have anticipated, or was this an event that analysts conducting standard analyses would have recognized as possible? We found that there was precedent for the cold temperatures, at individual locations and in aggregate,” Doss-Gollin said.ĭoss-Gollin’s paper, “How unprecedented was the February 2021 Texas cold snap?”, has been accepted for publication in Environmental Research Letters. “We set out to determine whether there was precedent in the historical record for the cold temperatures that Texas infrastructure experienced. Was the storm a statistical anomaly or should it have been expected?Īccording to research conducted by James Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at Rice, and his colleagues, precedent existed for such unseasonably low temperatures in Texas and the other south-central states. More than nine out of 10 residents of greater Houston lost electricity, heat and/or potable water during Winter Storm Uri, which struck much of the nation on Valentine’s Day. ![]()
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