This was the scene Wednesday on the Jesse Jones bridge (Beltway 8 at the Ship Channel) on the east side of town. Cars were gingerly crossing on the right-hand side and it looks like police have closed the left-hand side. This made for a horrible morning commute Thursday as most of the east side of Houston was shut down thanks to the odd snowstorm that hit Wednesday night.

A more playful scene here at the KHOU studios on Allen Parkway as snow accumulated our live truck and the grass nearby. Several staffers engaged in snowball fights.

Check out these snowfall amounts, it was incredible to see how much of it fell east of Houston.

This picture shows snow as blue, sleet as purple and green and yellow as rain:

However, as temperatures hovered around freezing, the wet snow iced up on bridges and overpasses. At 9:30 pm Wednesday, bridges north and east of town were closing. An elevated bridge is directly exposed to the air and ices up faster than a road on the ground. Nevertheless, all it takes is a little bit of ice on roads to cause a major Houston headache in the morning. Sometimes, just a rainy morning causes tow-truck operators to rub their hands gleefully.

So, how did all this happen? Well, a cold pool of air became dislodged from the polar jet stream and dove down into Texas early Tuesday and then meandered toward Houston.

How cold is the air? Well consider that at 9 pm Wednesday, we were colder than New York City and Washington, D.C. and that rarely happens!

The good news is that today's sunshine melted most of the snow and today's high of 52 seems like a heat wave compared to Wednesday, when our high for the day occurred just after midnight (43°) and we spent most of the day in the 30s. We almost broke a record for the lowest high temperature - 40°, set waaay back in 1898.

The last time we had measurable snow like this was Christmas Eve, 2004 and its interesting to note that just like after Hurricanes Alicia and Jerry, we had snow after Ike.

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