by Modern weather forecasts have never been so accurate, but they still have their limits.
The intense rainfall that sent flood water through Texas last week and even surprised some Texas officials with the seriousness, has the challenge of predicting the most serious storms and what even the best weather models cannot deliver.
“There is an expectation that a catastrophe like these hours or days in advance can be predicted and that is simply not the case,” said Alan Gerard, a former director of the analysis and understanding the branch at the National Severe Storms Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Models “can in principle show that there will be areas of intense rainfall, but they rarely place it in the right place.”
Efforts to close that gorge are at risk. Climate change increases the frequency of extreme rainfall, making the models all the more urgent improvements. Noaa is working on improving the prediction tools to better predict the intensity and precise location of the rainfall, but the most recent budget request of the Trump administration for the agency, which proposes to reduce the budget by more than $ 2 billion, would take out a large part of the serious storm examination of the agency.
Although predictors of the national weather service in general had generally warned about floods in the center of Texas, the state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas said that the best weather models could not predict exactly where the most intense rainfall would fall, or that the flood would fall over a flood-sensitive bass.
Puin is located on Tuesday along the river Guadalupe in Ingram, Texas. (Jim Vondruska / Getty images)
“It would have been almost impossible with the current technology to get the internal dynamics of the storm well,” said Nielsen-Gammon, which is the key to determine whether a storm will come out as he did. In this case, Nielsen-Gammon said that 3 to 4 centimeters was on the ground before it was clear that the system was stuck and would cause such intense floods about the South fork of the Guadalupe River, where the most intense destruction ultimately took place.
“If you look at the radar map, at 1 o’clock in the morning, there were things everywhere,” said Nielsen-Gammon about the scattered storms of the region. “You would not have chosen Kerr County.”
Noaa and its academic partners are working on developing better tools to predict Flash floods. David Gagne, a national center for atmospheric research scientist that is aimed at using machine learning to improve weather models,, for example, develops artificial intelligence algorithms to improve the accuracy of the short-term prediction.
Gagne said that Noaa has already developed another tool that has been designed to increase the lead time for Flash floods, the Warn-on Forecast system, but it is not yet operational for predictors at the National Weather Service.
The budget request of the Trump administration for Noaa in the tax year 2026 would be the Warn-on Forecast system and the research laboratories of the agency, which stimulate the prediction innovation.
“All NOAA’s research would be eliminated with a few small programmatic exceptions. All this work to improve the various prediction warnings within Noaa would almost end,” Gerard said.
Damage in a RV park in Center Point, Texas, on Monday. (Ashley Landis / AP)
At present, the best available tools can offer sufficient warning for a general threat of flash flash, but localized flash flames can only be predicted when real-time radar and sensor aids can determine the rainfall.
“The reality is for flooding in flood -sensitive areas, you should think about it in the same way if you do a tornado,” said Gerard. “We cannot tell you that your specific place is hit in the same way if we cannot tell you that your specific place is being hit by a tornado.”
Scientists expect more intense rainfall events, because human use of fossil fuels heats the atmosphere, making the quality of weather models even more important.
For every degree of warming in Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can retain approximately 3% to 4% more moisture. Worldwide temperatures in 2024 were approximately 2.32 degrees higher than the average of the 20th century, according to Noaa data.
“Rain occurs when you have a really moist package of air on the surface and it rises in the atmosphere and it cools … Think of a sponge full of water and you start pinching, the sponge and the water falls out,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A & M University, said. “In a warmer atmosphere there is more water in the sponge, so if you call it, you drop more water.”
Although climate change increases the risk of extreme rainfall, it should not have effects on the accuracy of weather models because they rely on real -time weather observations and the basis, underlying physics that regulate interactions between all kinds of matter. The laws of nature are insensitive to climate change.
“They use input data that contains climate change,” said Dessler. “It is recorded.”
In Texas, higher temperatures have already been translated into more intense rainfall. In a report from 2024, Nielsen-Gammon discovered that “extreme one-day precipitation” had risen by 5% to 15% since the end of the 20th century. By 2036 he expected an extra increase of around 10% in extreme rainfall intensity.
This article was originally published on nbcnews.com
