The Night Texas Hit 140°F (60°C) During a Thunderstorm

The date, June 15th, 1960. The location, the very small town of Copperville, Texas. It was a typical beautiful summer evening. Skies were clear and the temperature was a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit. But a line of strong thunderstorms was forecasted to roll in through the middle of the night. This was not something that was unusual. Central Texas and much of the plains in general encounter nocturnal thunderstorms all the time during the summer. So nobody in town gave the upcoming thunderstorm much thought. Parents put down their children for the night and went to bed. But as the storm passed over around midnight, everyone in town suddenly woke up. Was it a large bolt of lightning? No. Was it the sirens going off warning of an approaching tornado? No. It was actually a massive and sudden spike in temperature. According to those who witnessed the event, within a matter of minutes the temperature outside became extremely hot. Thermometers on buildings climbed all the way up until they maxed out at 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Celsius. During the thunderstorm, something strange caused the temperature to rise by nearly 50 degrees within only a few minutes. On top of the temperature spike, it was also extremely windy. And people panicked. Parents covered their children with wet towels. Some rushed to underground cellars with cooler temperatures. And some even thought it was the end of the world. And this heat didn't just last for a few minutes. No, it stayed near 140 degrees for four sweltering hours. It wouldn't be until 4 a.m. that the heat and the winds finally died down. The town's folk were so affected by this heat thunderstorm, they called the event Satan's Storm. The next morning, the residents of Copperall were eager to find out what happened. So they tuned in to the local news. What caused this freak heat storm? But to their surprise, nothing was mentioned about it on the news. Interestingly, this heat burst thunderstorm thing only seemed to happen over the town of Copperall. No other towns or cities in Texas reported a similar temperature spike. This further added to the mystery. Now, 140 degrees Fahrenheit, 60 degrees Celsius is a crazy outside temperature. Keep in mind, the highest official temperature ever recorded on this planet, like anywhere ever, is 134 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in Death Valley, California on July 10th in 1913. So if this supposed heat wave thunderstorm actually happened, like the town's folk claim, it would be the highest temperature ever recorded. So the question is, did this event actually happen? Well, surprisingly, the evidence suggests yes. But before we get to that, this video is sponsored by Mint Mobile. I'm a big fan of Mint Mobile. You know why? Because they don't have those stupid hidden fees. They give you premium wireless coverage without the premium price tag. 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Bright filmed the extreme wind damage and interviewed several eyewitnesses. I searched forever for this footage, YouTube, the Internet Archive. A lot of other people were looking for this footage too, so I thought for sure it was lost media. But I somehow was actually able to find this footage online. It was in the North Texas University archives. How crazy is that? Anyway, I received the footage and here's what he captured. Now he starts off by filming various examples of strong wind damage. And the wind damage definitely was significant. Clearly the winds were quite strong. I mean, look at this small convenience store. It looks like it was hit by an EF-1 or EF-2 tornado. Wind damage is cool and all, but we're here to talk about the heat. So let's get to the actual interviews. About 12 o'clock last night, the lights and air conditioners went off. So we went outside where we thought it would be cooler, but instead of being cooler, the temperature was about 100 degrees. It was just like a hot blister of air out of an oven hitting your face when you went out there. It was so hot you couldn't stay out there. And I called the electric power company and was telling them about how strong the wind was and the power was out and J.D. wasn't. Well, our crew that started down here, they reported back to me on the radio that it was so hot in the truck and they thought that the heater was on, so they checked the heater to make sure the heater wasn't off. How hot was it? Well, it was over 100 degrees. Was it hard to breathe? Well, you couldn't hardly breathe. It was just like you stick your head in the oven. George and I went to the dock several times, about three times, and his car got hot, the water was boiling his radiator. Many people had an extremely difficult time breathing, and wet towels were used to cool the air around their mouths to relieve some of their breathing difficulties, especially with young children and older adults. Well, there was one woman, her little kid couldn't hardly breathe and they had to put wet handkerchiefs on his nose so he could breathe because the air was so hot that it nearly suffocates you if you didn't have a wet towel or something that could moisten the air. One of the best ways to escape the heat during the event was to seek shelter in a storm cellar, since temperatures were cooler underground. One local farmer actually opened up his storm cellar to almost 20 people. What were your experiences during the storm? Well, the wind kept blowing and I couldn't sleep. My ears were popping, so I just thought I'd get up and go down to the storm house. We just had a half bed down there and we went in and stayed a while. Down there about an hour and a lot of company came in. About 19, I believe, in all, all told. I was still in bed in the house when they came, so I got up and joined the crowd. Well, we raised the wind in our house and the wind was so hot I thought the house was on fire, so we came over to Hokey's cellar and I was the second one in there and there he was in his shower. Another eyewitness of the event told their story on Reddit. I lived on a farm outside of Copperall when this happened. I was nine years old and I remember waking up in the middle of the night when our old window water cooler went off. It was eerily silent and then the house was hit by a strong and hot wind. My father decided we needed to go to the storm cellar outside the back door and we stayed in there for quite a while. Later, we saw the large advertising thermometer at Riddle's Bait Shop in Copperall had burst from the heat. On the news, we saw photos of someone's cotton field and all the plants were scorched. Very, very strange. Now, real quick, let's talk about that thermometer. In fact, let's talk about the 140 degree temperature because nowhere in any of the interviews did someone mention 140 degrees. In fact, the only mention of an actual thermometer was right here. I got up about midnight and it was hot. I came out here to see just how hot it was. This thermometer was setting on 100 degrees and I think it got hotter than that afterwards. I guess that could imply 140 degrees, but I'm not so sure. One primary source that did mention the 140 degree temperature was an article in the Clifton Record. The article was titled, Freak Heatwave Hits Lake Whitney. By the way, Lake Whitney is the lake that Copperall is located on. Tuesday night, residents in the vicinity of a lakeside village in Mooney Village experienced a freak weather condition that caused considerable damage and aroused fear among the residents. Intense night heat that generated destructive windstorms unroofed a number of buildings, toppling power poles and trees. The temperature climbed to 96 degrees. The weatherman reported that the temperature must have reached nearly 140 degrees for a brief time in spots. Pressure dropped swiftly and glass in the Mooney store shattered outward. A number of residents sought safety in a storm cellar. So that's all the evidence we really have for 140 degrees, but we do have some other evidence. Another more tangible piece of evidence might be the burned crops. A local farmer named Pete Burns, yes, literally his last name is Burns. Anyway, Mr. Burns reported that his cotton stalks had darkened and changed color and that you could crush them with your hands almost like as if it had been frozen in liquid nitrogen. I plowed this cotton yesterday and it was right by the stand of it. Today you can see it looks like a blowtorch had been run over it. And the same way with the corn right across the road here, the leaves had all burnt off of it. We also cut some hay. Normally it would take about two days for it to cure and it was cured overnight. We had such a hot wind. We're bailing it now. This journalist did a great job because he actually tried to record the sound of the crop breaking apart as if it was burnt. I think that's awesome. Even earlier in the video, he filmed like a cinematic scene of a car pulling up to some damage and then he switched to the two men walking out of the car. That's some pretty cool stuff. I love that. Since this occurred before the modern meteorological era, we really don't have any true data that it actually got that hot. We have no data from the event. All we have are just little pieces of evidence like burnt cotton and eyewitness testimonies. I mean clearly it got super hot out. With the breathing difficulties and people trying to escape their houses because they thought they were on fire. This kind of environment does sound like it can really only happen in an extreme heat like around the 130 degrees Fahrenheit range. Unfortunately though, like I said, no proper measurements were taken at the time. So no one truly knows how hot it actually got. If only this event had happened today. Well actually, a very similar event did happen much more recently. On August 23rd, 2011, the townspeople of Atlantic, Iowa were going about their day when suddenly the temps went up. A lot. But this time it didn't happen in the middle of the night. No, it happened in the late afternoon, early evening around 5.55 p.m. Everything was chill. Everything was calm. The temp was 84 degrees. It's a little hot, but you know, nothing unusual. The dew point was 75 degrees and the winds were near 5 miles per hour. But within five minutes, the winds picked up to 20 miles per hour and the temp went up to 86 degrees. Okay, that's not too bad, only 2 degrees. But then 10 minutes later, around 6.15, the wind was blowing at a brisk 60 miles per hour and the temp continued to go up to 93 degrees. The dew point had also dropped to 54 degrees. So the temp went up about 7 degrees in only 15 minutes. But it wasn't over yet. Over the next hour until 7.05 p.m., the temperature would rise even more, up to 102 degrees Fahrenheit, and the dew point plummeted to 7 degrees. At this peak heat, the winds surprisingly died down to only 3 miles per hour. Within an hour, the temp went up nearly 20 degrees. And the Iowans noticed. Weird weather gets Iowans talking. And today, our Eric Hansen found out that in towns all across southwest Iowa, people were asking, did you feel what moved through town just before sunset? I noticed the temperature change. I felt this heat rising up through the window. And I said to my husband, you need to come here. It just felt like when you open your oven after it's been preheated. It was just like that. It was just a gust of hot air, just exactly like a blow dryer. As if you had just turned on a heater, and it was coming at your face. With winds up to 60 miles an hour and plummeting humidity. But even crazier was how fast it left. It was just a matter of minutes. It just calmed down. It was weird. Mother Nature's not happy with us. Everyone here in town knows exactly what it felt like, but no one really knows why it happened. Of course, the great thing about this event is that, unlike the Texas event in 1960, this time we have the data. Here's a graph showing the dew point and temperature over the time frame of the event provided by the Atlantic AWOS. There were also multiple other weather stations at schools that recorded the anomaly. The temperature and dew point data collected from these various schools clearly show the temperature slowly rising and then a sudden spike around 715. They also showed the sudden wind speed increase. Clearly the same phenomenon that happened in Corporal, Texas in 1960 appears to have happened again. A lot of the language is the same as well. Like the air felt like the heat when you open an oven. It was just like a hot blister of air out of the oven hitting your face when you went out there. It just felt like when you open your oven after it's been preheated. And clearly, I mean clearly, this sudden change in temperature was pretty impactful. It was a big change. Something that was extremely noticeable, not just minor. This was like, I thought the house was on fire. I looked out the window to see if there was something going on because it was so sudden and so obvious. So what is going on? What is up with these micro heat waves? Well, meteorologists have actually figured out exactly what's going on. These two events were caused by a very rare meteorological phenomenon known as the heat burst. So what is a heat burst? Well, a heat burst is a sudden yet brief wave of very hot wind. These occur when hot air lofted high up in the atmosphere, usually around 10 to 20,000 feet up, is suddenly blown down to the ground. In a very similar mechanism to another much more common phenomenon that you probably have heard of, the downburst. Okay, so with any thunderstorm, you have pockets of moisture, rain, hail, up in the atmosphere, and this moisture then cools the surrounding air. Cool air is denser than warm air, so it falls rapidly and then can get flushed out onto the ground, for lack of a better term. Okay, but I just said cool air there. How does it occur with hot air? Well, in an extremely rare circumstance, the cool moist air that originated high up into the cumulonimbus cloud, as it falls, the rain and moisture evaporates, and as it evaporates, it becomes extremely dry, and then that air compresses, and that compression actually causes it to get super hot, and then all that hot air just on to the ground, and then boom, you get a heat wave down on the surface. They usually occur when the parent thunderstorm is decaying, and they usually occur during the night. Let's go back to the Atlantic Iowa example and look at the data to see how this particular heat burst formed. Here is a sounding chart, a vertical view of the atmosphere near Omaha around 7pm, as the heat burst was occurring over Iowa. This line represents the temperature, and do you see how it suddenly gets hotter as it descends through the atmosphere? It's heating up through compression. Here's a velocity scan of the high wind reported during the heat burst near Guthrie. Now, this entire area likely got super hot, but it's believed that this specific high velocity area had the highest temperatures. Unfortunately, no one was actually in this area at the time to record the true top temp. So what are some other verified, keyword verified, we'll talk about unverified later, heat bursts throughout history? Well, the very first mention of the heat burst phenomenon may have been in Georgia in 1860. A Scientific America article, Volume 3, 106, stated, A hot wind extending about 100 yards in width lately passed through middle Georgia and scorched up cotton crops on a number of plantations. A hot wind also passed through a section of Kansas. It burned up the vegetation in its track, and several persons fell victim to the poisonous blast. It lasted for a very short period, during which the thermometer stood at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Sounds a lot like a heat burst. In terms of the record in swing in temperature, like the greatest temperature climb of a verified heat burst, that occurred during a heat burst in 2008 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Around 4 a.m. on August 3, 2008, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, during a thunderstorm, the wind suddenly picked up, and the temperature went from 70 degrees Fahrenheit all the way up to 101 degrees Fahrenheit in only 15 minutes. It went up a massive 31 degrees. Around 3.45 in the morning, campers at Wall Lake contacted police to report strong winds and unusually high temperatures. There was also a significant pressure drop during the incident. And this is interesting because a major pressure drop was also recorded during the Copper Hole, Texas heat burst in 1960. In fact, one farmer during the event stated that his ears were popping. My ears were popping, so I just thought I'd get up and go down to the storm house. It was also noted that the windows of a local store broke outward due to the low pressure. That's probably the wind. I don't know. But as you can see, a similar pressure drop was recorded in Sioux Falls in 2008. And then the pressure quickly returned to its previous level as the storm dissipated. The highest verified temperature ever recorded during a heat burst was in Phoenix, Arizona on July 28, 1995, where the temp climbed from 160 degrees Fahrenheit to only 114 degrees Fahrenheit. So not quite 140. Also, this is kind of crazy, but one heat burst actually just occurred like last week. Like as I was recording this video and doing research, like one happened. There was a significant heat burst in Viewbank, Australia in the middle of the night on January 9th, 2026. The temperature went from 18 degrees Celsius at 2 a.m. to 36 degrees Celsius at 4 a.m. and then all the way back down to 18 degrees Celsius by 530 a.m. That's actually crazy. But if you want to talk crazy, then we should discuss unverified heat bursts because these these really are crazy. For example, apparently in Portugal on July 6, 1949, the temperature went from 38 degrees Celsius all the way up to 70 degrees Celsius in... Are you ready? Two minutes. That's that's crazy. What? That's some extreme weather right there. This was apparently possible because this heat burst just happened to occur during a significant heat wave. One newspaper article at the time stated that the blast of hot air to the people encountering it felt like being licked by fiery tongues. Does not sound pleasant at all. In terms of unverified heat bursts, the max temp ever recorded was an outstanding 188 degrees Fahrenheit or 87 degrees Celsius shade temperature in June 1967 in Abadan, Iraq. That's... Wow. Apparently, and unfortunately, this event killed 12 men. So yeah, mystery solved. Now we know the mechanisms behind these so-called Satan storms. Did it really get up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in Texas in 1960? Well, anything 140 plus kind of seems a little crazy to me. To be honest, they might have been exaggerating a little bit. But I mean, clearly something happened. I personally believe it was probably around 130 degrees. I mean, the heat was clearly substantial enough for the locals to make a big deal out of it. And it also lasted for so long. Four hours? That's not very typical of a normal heat burst. So there is still a little bit of a mystery with that event. But overall, we have a good idea of what happened. The heat burst phenomenon is likely one we will encounter more in the future. And perhaps one extreme example soon will be fully documented and will finally break that 100-year-old 136-degree heat record in Death Valley. Quick announcement. There's a new members-only video on megachirometeors. These are large chunks of ice that mysteriously randomly fall under blue skies. What is going on there? Well, be sure to check out that video if you're a member. But yes, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.