Central Texas can get pretty rainy in the spring, and I've always wondered why it often seems to rain in the middle of the night. It's like the weather is designed to keep me from getting sleep.
So, I asked meteorologist Burton Fitzsimmons if he could explain things.
“Think about the hot, dry desert air that’s out there in West Texas, and here we have this very muggy, warm air [in Austin],” Fitzsimmons said. “Well, the dividing line between those two air masses is like a little front.”
Usually it’s the heat of the day that starts the storms out in West Texas — right in the middle of the afternoon, he said.
It takes until the nighttime hours for some of those storms to reach Central Texas, Fitzsimmons says, “and by the time they make it up to I-35 it is, sometimes, right in the middle of your dream.”
This piece originally aired May 2, 2016.
