Meteorologists say the National Weather Service did its job accurately predicting flood risk in Texas
Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.
But meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm. What’s more, they say that what the NWS did forecast this week underscores the need to sustain funding to the crucial agency.
Meteorologists first had an idea that a storm may be coming for this part of Texas last weekend, after Tropical Storm Barry made landfall in Mexico. “When you have a tropical system, it’s just pumping moisture northward,” says Chris Vagasky, an American Meteorological Society-certified digital meteorologist based in Wisconsin. “It starts setting the stage for heavy rainfall events.”
The NWS office in San Antonio on Monday predicted a potential for “downpours”—as well as heavy rain specifically at nighttime—later on in the week as the result of these conditions. By Thursday, it forecast up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas.
The San Antonio and Hill Country regions of Texas are no stranger to floods. But Friday morning’s storm was particularly catastrophic. The Guadalupe River surged more than 20 feet in just a few hours to its second-highest level in recorded history. Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told media Friday morning that the county “didn’t know this flood was coming.”
“We have floods all the time… we deal with floods on a regular basis,” he said. “When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.”
W. Nim Kidd, the Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), echoed Kelly’s comments at a press conference with Governor Greg Abbott on Friday. Kidd said that TDEM worked with its meteorologist to “refine” NWS forecasts. “The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,” he said.
Predicting “how much rain is going to fall out of a thunderstorm, that’s the hardest thing that a meteorologist can do,” Vagasky says. A number of unpredictable factors—including some element of chance—go into determining the amount of rainfall in a specific area, he says.
“The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event,” says Vagasky. “But pinpointing exactly where that’s going to fall, you can’t do that.”
Flash floods in this part of Texas are nothing new. Eight inches of rainfall in the state “could be on a day that ends in Y,” says Matt Lanza, also a certified digital meteorologist based in Houston. It’s a challenge, he says, to balance forecasts that often show extreme amounts of rainfall with how to adequately prepare the public for these rare but serious storms. [Continue reading…]
The amount of rain that fell Friday morning was hard for the Weather Service to anticipate, with reports in some areas of 15 inches over just a few hours, according to Louis W. Uccellini, who was director of the National Weather Service from 2013 until 2022.
“It’s pretty hard to forecast for these kinds of rainfall rates,” Dr. Uccellini said. He said that climate change was making extreme rainfall events more frequent and severe, and that more research was needed so that the Weather Service could better forecast those events.
An equally important question, he added, was how the Weather Service was coordinating with local emergency managers to act on those warnings as they came in.
“You have to have a response mechanism that involves local officials,” Dr. Uccellini said. “It involves a relationship with the emergency management community, at every level.”
But that requires having staff members in those positions, he said.
Under the Trump administration, the Weather Service, like other federal agencies, has been pushed to reduce its number of employees. By this spring, through layoffs and retirements, the Weather Service had lost nearly 600 people from a work force that until recently was as large as 4,000. [Continue reading…]
Paul Yura, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio office, has announced he has taken the early retirement offer as part of NOAA’s recent cuts to personnel and budget.
Yura has over 32 years experience, spending more than half of his career at the NWS Austin/San Antonio office. In the process, he gained tremendous experience understanding local weather patterns while ensuring timely warnings get disseminated to the public in a multitude of ways.
The warning coordination meteorologist (WCM) is a senior role at a local NWS office. According to NOAA, “The WCM coordinates the warning function of the office with the outside world. This would include heading the Skywarn Program, conducting spotter training and being a voice to the local media for the office.”
Only the ‘meteorologist in charge’ (MIC) has a higher position within a local office.
Yura’s retirement is part of an early retirement package offered to National Weather Service employees as the Trump Administration works to slash the budget at NWS and the larger NOAA organization. [Continue reading…]
Nearly 40 years ago, a flash flood resulted in one of the worst tragedies to ever strike the Texas Hill Country. On the night of July 16, 1987, just outside Comfort, the kids at Pot O’ Gold Christian Camp were settling in for their final night of the retreat, while 30 miles up the Guadalupe River, at the other end of Kerr County, heavy rainfall would turn what had been a sleepy river into a wall of water.
While trying to evacuate the camp, a bus carrying 43 campers never made it across. Sadly, 10 of those on the bus drowned.
In a report on a legal fight and feud between members of the family who own Camp Mystic, Texas Monthly offered this description of the camp in 2011:
The camp has always served as a near-flawless training ground for archetypal Texas women. For the current fee of $4,375 for a thirty-day session, Mystic girls learn to shoot rifles, ride horses, catch bass, hike in the August sun without complaint, and face down a rattlesnake or two. In blistering tribe competitions—campers are divided into Kiowas and Tonkawas—they learn the value of teamwork. A long line of notable alumnae reveals the kind of girl that Mystic attracts: Mary Martin, who famously played a sprightly, tirelessly cheerful boy, was the first celebrity camper; she was followed by the daughters of governors Price Daniel, Dan Moody, and John Connally. LBJ’s daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters attended; James Baker sent a daughter and a granddaughter. Laura Bush worked as a counselor between terms at Southern Methodist University. Mystic girls say their camp days prepare them for the real world: They become executives for Neiman Marcus, dance with London’s Royal Ballet, own a Gymboree franchise in the former Soviet Union, or marry well and become the kind of intensely focused volunteers who would probably be happier as CEOs.