The first serious storm system of meteorological spring for Central Texas will arrive this weekend, bringing the potential for strong thunderstorms, large hail, gusty winds, heavy rainfall and a noticeable drop in temperatures.
Austin, TX
Texas weather forecast: Here’s the hour-by-hour rain timeline for Austin
On Saturday, a large swath of Texas is under a level 2 of 5 risk of scattered severe thunderstorms capable of producing damaging winds and hail.
Looking at the overall setup, Texas is sandwiched between two storm systems that originally developed from the same large trough of low atmospheric pressure in the jet stream. On Friday, that system split with one piece moving northeast before becoming an upper-level system of low pressure over the Great Lakes, while the other retrograded southwest toward Baja California.
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Saturday’s surface map shows all the weather features driving Texas weather through the weekend.
Saturday’s weather setup
Our weather on Saturday will be influenced by the upper-level low pressure over the Great Lakes, which is dragging a strong cold front southward into Texas. Across Central Texas, the combination of a dry line separating dry and humid air masses and the approaching cold front will provide enough atmospheric lift to trigger scattered thunderstorms during the afternoon.
Ahead of the front, a deep pool of moisture-rich air from the Gulf of Mexico will continue to build, increasing atmospheric instability and helping storms develop and intensify. This setup creates the potential for severe afternoon thunderstorms capable of producing large hail — more than 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter, or around golf-ball size — along with strong wind gusts.
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SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS: Know these cloud formations to prepare for the Texas severe weather that’s headed our way
The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has placed all of Central Texas under a level 2 out of 5 risk for scattered but brief severe thunderstorms on Saturday.
The severe weather threat will decrease with the passage of the cold front, but the cut-off system of low pressure near Baja California will begin to play a larger role in our weather. Atmospheric disturbances rotating around this system will move into Texas beginning Saturday night. It will continue to harass Texas with multiple rounds of showers and thunderstorms into early next week.
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Rainfall totals will add up quickly, and the National Weather Service gives Central Texas a 90% chance of receiving at least an inch of rain from Saturday through Sunday.
Hour-by-hour forecast
Saturday morning will start off very muggy across Central Texas, with overcast skies and light southerly winds. Dew point temperatures will range from the mid-60s to near 70 degrees, indicating a very moist atmosphere. Meanwhile, much drier air will sit just west of the Hill Country behind the dry line, where significantly lower dew points will be observed.
Dew point temperatures at 10 a.m. Saturday shows a sharp boundary between moist air and much drier air across Texas. Along this boundary, showers and thunderstorms will begin developing.
What are dew point temperatures? It is a reliable indicator of how much moisture is in the air and how comfortable it feels outside. When dew points climb above 65 degrees, conditions begin to feel humid in Central Texas, and values approaching 70 degrees can feel downright oppressive. While dew point is not a direct measurement of total atmospheric moisture, it is a strong indicator of how much moisture is present in the air.
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By noon, scattered showers and thunderstorms will begin developing in the Hill Country along the frontal boundary, where atmospheric instability will be greatest. In Austin, a few spotty showers are possible, but the heavier storms are expected to arrive later.
Winds will remain light out of the southeast along and east of Interstate 35, and temperatures will reach their warmest point of the day around lunchtime, ranging from the upper 60s to the upper 70s.
Texas temperatures will climb into the 70s to near 80 degrees around lunchtime, then steadily drop through the afternoon behind the cold front.
The cold front will arrive in the Austin area during the early afternoon before pushing toward Southeast Texas during the late afternoon and early evening. The front will provide the necessary lift in the atmosphere to produce more widespread thunderstorms. This will be the period when the threat of severe weather is highest, with large hail, damaging winds and minor flooding as the main concerns throughout the afternoon.
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Keep in mind that if you have outdoor plans, you should be prepared to seek shelter as soon as you see lightning or hear thunder.
Scattered rain and thunderstorms will move into the Austin metro area on Saturday, with some storms capable of producing gusty winds, frequent lightning and brief heavy downpours.
Temperatures will climb above March’s average high of 70 degrees ahead of the front, but once the front moves through, they will drop quickly. Readings in the mid to upper 70s around 2 p.m. will fall into the upper 50s and low 60s by 7 p.m.
Winds will also become gusty behind the frontal boundary, with some locations seeing gusts of 25 to 30 mph. These stronger winds are a sign of a tightening pressure gradient, which occurs as air pressure changes across the region.
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Isolated wind gusts in Texas could reach 50 to 60 mph with any strong thunderstorm that moves through on Saturday. Otherwise, wind will increase behind the front, with gusts near 30 mph.
The front will lose momentum on Saturday night and stall across South Texas. Rain chances will continue overnight and into Sunday as several atmospheric disturbances rotate toward us from a closed system of low pressure system out to the west.
Temperatures will run cooler than normal on Sunday before warming back into the 70s and 80s next week.
Michael Dorman
Austin, Texas, is revving up to sell $2.35 billion of debt for a convention center and a wastewater treatment plant, while a legal battle continues over bonds to help finance a light rail system.
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The bond boom comes as the city council voted on Thursday to pursue the development of a $390 million baseline general obligation bond package for the November ballot despite a call by Mayor Kirk Watson to wait until 2028.
“I believe we can and we should bring forward significant investments in the future,” he said. “In fact, if we restore compliance with our financial policies and we maintain the discipline we actually will have greater future capacity to do more for this community in 2028.”
A bond election would
The city, which last held a successful GO bond election in 2022 for $350 million of debt for affordable housing, had $1.03 billion of unissued voter-approved GO bond authorization as of the Sept. 30 end of fiscal 2025. Last year,
On Thursday, the city council signed off on a $34.5 million wrongful prosecution and conviction settlement with four individuals to be financed through the sale of non-voter-approved GO bonds.
The council approved up to $1.35 billion of special tax revenue bonds on May 21 for a $1.6 billion project to replace the city’s now-demolished convention center with a facility that will increase rentable event space to 620,000 square feet from 365,000 square feet.
Rich Saskal
The bonds are backed with revenue from certain city hotel occupancy taxes and incremental state tax revenue generated within a project finance zone the city established in 2024. Amounts and timings for issuing the debt are being determined, according to the city, which filed a petition with a Travis County District Court for an expedited validation of the bonds.
An ordinance approved in October
The city also plans to refund hotel occupancy tax-backed debt issued for the prior convention center in order to pledge a 4.5% hotel tax for the upcoming bonds.
“The refunding bonds are a separate, but related item to the expansion bonds and will only be secured by 2% venue HOT,” city documents said. “The 2% venue HOT will not be pledged to the expansion bonds and will cease to be collected upon final maturity or early payoff of (the refunding bonds).”
A petition drive that would have delayed the project fell 494 signatures short of a requirement for 20,000 valid signatures of registered voters, Austin City Clerk Erika Brady determined in November.
Petition backers are appealing a district court’s refusal to force validation in state appellate court after the Texas Supreme Court dismissed
The petition drive by Austin United PAC and others sought a ballot measure to stop the demolition and reconstruction of the convention center for seven years — or until the project was approved by voters — and prioritize city funding for local live music, arts, cultural, and outdoor tourism.
The Austin City Council also approved as much as $1 billion of water and wastewater system revenue bonds last month for the Walnut Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant expansion and enhancement project. The bonds will be used to obtain a direct low-interest loan from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program.
Other financing sources for the $1.5 billion project are $59 million from the Texas Water Development Board Clean Water State Revolving Fund program and funding from Austin Water.
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The plant, which serves more than 50% of Austin and operates at a treatment capacity of 75 million gallons per day, will have its capacity increased to 100 MGD, helping meet future demand and requirements set by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for Austin’s projected growth of 1.5 million by 2040, according to a city statement.
A legal logjam over a light rail system eased May 22 when the Texas Supreme Court finally ruled on a procedural issue related to an initial $150 million of bonds for the project. The high court ordered a Travis County Court judge to decide whether the bonds’ issuer, the Austin Transit Partnership, a nonprofit corporation created by the city and Capital Metro Transportation Authority, has standing to seek court validation for the debt.
City taxpayers who filed a lawsuit in 2023, along with the Texas Attorney General’s Office have been challenging the legality of the bonds, which would be paid off with a portion of Austin’s operation and maintenance property taxes
Escalating costs led ATP to downsize Project Connect to an initial less than 10-mile, 15-station system with a similar price tag. The completion of a federal environmental review in January allowed the project to continue a process
ATP said Project Connect is moving forward with construction scheduled to begin next year.
“We are confident in our case and look forward to our day in court,” ATP said in a statement. “The pending litigation has not slowed our progress advancing Austin light rail, which has hit major milestones in the federal funding process, design, and pre-construction work this year.”
Bill Aleshire, an attorney who filed the taxpayers’ lawsuit, cautioned that several issues remain before the court, including the legality of the downsized project and the ability to pay off bonds with property tax revenue that is supposed to be used for operations.
“Their federal funding is uncertain, their ability to issue bonds is uncertain, and they just stubbornly will not listen to us and say it’s time to pause Project Connect and rethink it, that maybe rail isn’t the best way to go at this time and maybe we can’t afford it at this time,” he said.
AUSTIN, Texas (KTRK) — Does the state of Texas have too many law enforcement agencies? That was a topic of discussion at a Texas House Committee meeting on May 28, which focused on police standards and policy.
It was comments from TCOLE Deputy Chief TJ Vineyard that drew the attention of unions and lobbying groups representing law enforcement across Texas.
“We’re starting to look now at encouraging the consolidation of agencies,” Vineyard said during the nearly eight-hour-long hearing.
The response was almost immediate from groups representing various aspects of law enforcement.
One social media post on Facebook from the Texas Law Enforcement Association proclaimed concern about the future of smaller departments across the state, despite an exchange later in the hearing between the committee chair, State Representative Cole Hefner, and TCOLE’s Executive Director, Chief Gregory Stevens.
“We’re not taking police off the street?” Hefner asked. “We’re making sure that we have qualified people that are equipped and trained.”
“One hundred percent,” Stevens said.
According to TCOLE’s own numbers, there are more than 2,700 accredited agencies and some 83,000 peace officers.
The chair asked whether 2,700 was a good or bad thing, given that Texas has more agencies than the next four largest states combined.
“There is a lot of duplicative coverage,” Stevens said, “overlapping coverage. When it comes to resources, it can be inefficient.”
Also speaking on the panel was Jennifer Szimanski with the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), which also posted on social media about the hearing. While the group wouldn’t comment directly about consolidation, Szimanski told ABC13 that “consolidation is not the legislative intent for TCOLE” and that “we should be forward-looking and raising standards”.
But in a conversation with ABC13, Stevens said targeting smaller departments is not their intent. TCOLE wants every department, regardless of size, to comply with the higher standards implemented in 2023.
“Some of the things that are out there surfing out across social media and on other platforms is that TCOLE wants to shut down small agencies and let sheriff’s offices take over, and that’s absolutely not true. It couldn’t be further from what we’re doing,” Stevens said. “It doesn’t matter about the size of the agencies, and I want to be really clear on that point. TECOL is not out to shut down or to make life hard on a small municipal agency, a school district, police department, or what have you.”
But the larger conversation is not limited to the state of Texas.
Harris County is home to more than 60 agencies. In the last major study on overlap in 2018, Rice University’s Kinder Institute found that consolidation could help address inefficiencies. Kyle Shelton, now at the University of Minnesota, co-authored the report eight years ago.
“It’s really just an opportunity to look at how regional governments, which are often overlapping, best coordinate and collaborate on the services that they’re providing,” Shelton told ABC13.
Whether it’s Harris County or the state of Texas, the cost of funding and maintaining law enforcement agencies is getting more expensive. While consolidation may not be the answer, it is part of a conversation in which Kyle Shelton says governments should be engaging.
“It’s not a quick band-aid to pull off and say, ‘Hey, look, we fixed the budget crisis, or, you know, addressed some efficiencies here in a nice, neat three-month process,” Shelton said. “You know, it likely takes years and a lot of trust building, both with residents and the agencies.”
Texas does have more law enforcement agencies than the next four largest states combined, according to TCOLE.
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AUSTIN, Texas – Pride Month is celebrated each June.
It marks the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that started in late June 1969. The protests are seen as a turning point in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. It inspired marches across the country in the years that followed.
More than a dozen cities and towns across Texas are celebrating with everything from parades to festivals to concerts and more.
A Pride flag is seen held up in a crowd during preparation for a Queer March to the Texas State Capitol on April 15, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
Here’s a look at some of the dates and places Pride events are happening around the Lone Star State this month:
Austin also has a Pride celebration, but it is scheduled for Aug. 22.
The Source: Information in this story came from various sources, including official websites for events. AI was used to help assemble the list of events.
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