How good was the Texas weather forecast before the flood? : NPR

As early as Wednesday, Texas officials were marshalling the state’s emergency response resources to prepare for the coming storm.

By Thursday afternoon, the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office had issued a flood watch for multiple counties, warning of “pockets of heavy rain” and the potential for flooding.

But when the storm unleashed its historic ferocity in the early hours of Friday morning, many were caught by surprise. Heavy downpours lifted the Guadalupe River 26 feet in just 45 minutes. First responders had to rescue hundreds of people who were left stranded by the rising waters, and at least 78 people died. Sixty-eight of those fatalities occurred in Kerr County. Many people are missing.

Judge Rob Kelly, the top-elected official in Kerr County, told reporters that flooding is common to the area, which he called the most dangerous river valley in the U.S., but it’s rarely this devastating.

“We didn’t know this flood was coming,” Kelly said. “Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming.”

A spokesperson for the National Weather Service (NWS), however, noted that the agency held forecast briefings for emergency officials on Thursday, issued a flood watch on Thursday and sent out flash flood warnings Thursday evening and Friday morning.

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“The National Weather Service remains committed to our mission to serve the American public through our forecasts and decision support services,” NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei said in a statement.

In the aftermath of the storm, a division began to form between National Weather Service forecasters and some Texas officials who felt that their weather reports did not accurately predict the catastrophic power of the storm.

Predicting the behavior of complex weather systems is a challenging task, as meteorologists struggle to accurately forecast extreme weather events and convince officials and the public to prepare for the worst. Michael Morgan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, emphasized the difficulty of precipitation forecasting in his field. While the National Weather Service provided general and local forecasts for the Texas storm, highlighting potential threats as more information became available, the accuracy of these forecasts was questioned by some officials, including Texas Division of Emergency Management chief W. Nim Kidd. Despite the challenges faced by meteorologists, efforts are made to disseminate warnings and prepare for unforeseen weather events. According to Pat Fitzpatrick, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, there is a risk of flash flooding, but there is no expectation of a water wall nearly thirty feet high. Fitzpatrick stated that the recent tragic weather event was the result of a rare and complex weather system occurring over the long July Fourth weekend. He emphasized that state officials and the National Weather Service followed proper protocols for pre-storm and ongoing storm management.

Critics have raised concerns about the impact of job cuts on the National Weather Service’s workforce, questioning whether the deadly consequences of the storm were exacerbated by the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce federal staffing, including at the NWS and NOAA. The NWS faced a significant loss of nearly 600 employees earlier this year, prompting the agency to begin hiring over 100 employees to address the staffing shortfall. Among those who left was Paul Yura, the warning coordination meteorologist at the NWS’s Austin/San Antonio office.

The duties of a warning coordination meteorologist include serving as a liaison to public safety officials and providing crucial information on severe weather to government authorities. Despite these responsibilities, the Austin/San Antonio Weather Forecast Office currently has multiple vacancies within its staff. Former NOAA assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, Morgan, expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s threats to cut funding for weather forecasting research.

Morgan highlighted the importance of investing in research to enhance weather forecasting capabilities and prevent future tragedies like the one in Texas. He pointed out that proposed budget cuts could eliminate funding for key research institutions such as the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and the National Severe Storms Lab, which play vital roles in studying and modeling severe weather patterns. The following is a rewritten version of the text you provided:

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