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- Texas Officials Question Weather Forecasts Amid Floods</p>
<p>Rebecca SchneidJuly 8, 2025 at 4:54 AM</p>
<p>Texan communities are dealing with the impact of the deadly flash floods along the Guadalupe River, which have killed at least 95 people so far, including 27 (mostly children) from the all-girls Camp Mystic summer camp, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said was "horrendously ravaged" by the flood waters.</p>
<p>As authorities and locals assembled to deal with the initial impact on Friday, some Texas officials raised concerns about the warnings they received from the National Weather Service (NWS), saying the predictions had underestimated the incoming rainfall and did not adequately prepare local authorities for what was to come. Meanwhile, meteorologists have said that the NWS did all it could have done prior to the floods.</p>
<p>On Monday, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York wrote a letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department's acting inspector general, requesting that he "open an investigation into the scope, breadth, and ramifications of whether staffing shortages at key local National Weather Service (NWS) stations contributed to the catastrophic loss of life and property during the deadly flooding."</p>
<p>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the NWS, is among the agencies that have experienced mass layoffs under the Trump Administration, with firings of probationary employees starting just weeks after Trump returned to the White House.In May, the former directors of the NWS published an open letter to "the American people," warning that Trump's cuts leave "the nation's official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit—down more than 10% of its staffing—just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes."</p>
<p>The authors of the letter highlighted their fears, saying: "Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that's a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines—and by the people who depend on their efforts."</p>
<p>On Sunday, Trump was asked by a reporter if, in light of the Texas floods, the "federal government needs to hire back any of the meteorologists that were fired" in the last few months.</p>
<p>"I wouldn't know that. I really wouldn't. I would think not. This was a thing that happened in seconds, nobody expected it, nobody saw it. Very talented people are there and they didn't see it," Trump said, adding that people are trying to assign blame, but "it's just a horrible thing."</p>
<p>White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed this stance on Monday, saying that "the National Weather Service did its job despite unprecedented rainfall," referring to the floods as a "once in a generation natural disaster." She went on to refer to questions raised by Schumer and others as "falsehoods."</p>
<p>Rick Spinrad, the former administrator of NOAA, has addressed the concerns, saying that while many of the weather forecast offices are not currently operating with a full staff, it's too soon to tell if that impacted how the floods were forecast and dealt with."A lot of the weather forecast offices now are not operating at full complement of staff, which means that you're really putting an extra burden on these folks. I don't know how much that was a factor in what happened in Texas this weekend," he said on Saturday.</p>
<p>"Without research, without staff to do the work, we can assume that the predictions and not just hurricanes—tornadoes, floods, drought, wildfires, tsunamis, for that matter—are undoubtedly going to degrade. And that means that people's ability to prepare for these storms will be compromised."</p>
<p>Texas Division of Emergency Management chief Nim Kidd told reporters at a press conference on Friday that NWS advisories and forecasts "did not predict the amount of rain we saw."</p>
<p>When asked about the severity of the warnings he did see, Kidd said: "The original forecast that we received Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6 inches of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8 inches in the Hill Country. The amount of rain that fell at this specific location was never in any of those forecasts."</p>
<p>Kidd was not the only Texas official to call into question the weather notices. Dalton Rice, the city manager for Kerrville, said it "dumped more rain than what was forecast."</p>
<p>Kerr County judge Rob Kelly told reporters: "We didn't know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming. We have floods all the time… when it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what's happened here. None whatsoever." Kelly also said he did not know what kind of warning, if any, the leaders at Camp Mystic would have received ahead of the flash floods.</p>
<p>Read More: Rescuers Search for Girls From Texas Camp as Flooding Death Toll Rises</p>
<p>The NWS San Antonio office on Tuesday predicted a potential for "downpours" and heavy rain, which then escalated to a forecast of up to 7 inches of rainfall in isolated areas. On Thursday, the office issued a broad flood watch for parts of south-central Texas, including Kerr County, though the most severe warnings started when the NWS issued a "life-threatening flash flooding" warning in Kerrville at 1:14 a.m. local time on Friday. The alert triggered the Emergency Alert System, which would have sounded the alarm on cell phones throughout the area, providing people had service and had not turned off their emergency alerts. The alert was issued roughly three hours before the first reports of flooding came in.</p>
<p>Meteorologists have said the NWS did all it could in regards to the forecasts issued prior to the floods.</p>
<p>On Saturday, meteorologist John Morales took to social media to defend the NWS, stating that the "local officials blaming NWS are wrong."</p>
<p>"I don't see any evidence that cuts to NOAA/NWS caused any degradation in the anticipatory weather warnings ahead of this Texas tragedy," Morales said, sharing data from the NWS.</p>
<p>Morales later said that while nothing more could have been done prior to the flooding, he is of the opinion that unfilled positions at the NWS San Antonio station—some impacted by DOGE-driven cuts and others pre-dating Trump's second term—could have affected the NWS' ability to effectively coordinate with local officials after the floods struck.</p>
<p>"The relationship between emergency managers, media, and [the] NWS is cultivated over years. It is a three-legged stool that can age well as long as it's maintained with good comms and practice," Morales said. "Having NWS managers—Meteorologist in Charge, Warning Coordination Meteorologist, and Science Operations Officer—missing would break the stool, but slowly."</p>
<p>TIME has reached out to the National Weather Service for comment.</p>
<p>Read More: Mass Layoffs at NOAA Spark Concerns Over Weather, Climate Research</p>
<p>Other meteorologists have also spoken out.</p>
<p>CBS Austin's Avery Tomasco said: "The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the catastrophic flood. A flash flood warning was issued for Hunt and Ingram three hours before the Guadalupe started to climb. They did their job and they did it well."</p>
<p>Meteorologist Chris Vagasky told Wired that it is incredibly difficult for a meteorologist to actually say how much rainfall will occur.</p>
<p>"The signal was out there that this is going to be a heavy, significant rainfall event," Vagasky said. "But pinpointing exactly where that's going to fall? You can't do that."</p>
<p>While meteorologists sensed a weather event of some sort was on the horizon, the timing of the flash flood alerts seemingly left some with little time to act.</p>
<p>When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem joined Gov. Abbott at a press conference over the weekend, she said Trump is currently overseeing an upgrade of the technology used to deliver weather alerts to the public. "We know everybody wants more warning time and that's why we're working to update the technology that has been neglected for far too long," she explained.</p>
<p>On Sunday morning, Kerrville City manager Rice was asked about why summer camps were not evacuated, despite the warning days earlier that a storm could occur.</p>
<p>In response, he said: "That, that is a great question, but again, we want to make sure that we continue to focus. We still have 11 missing children that we want to get reunited with our families."</p>
<p>J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric department at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society tells TIME there were "ample weather warnings" of a high impact rain event in the area, but the challenges lie more in how to message such warnings, particularly in the case of an overnight incident like the Texas floods."There's a reasonable question about if we need a more advanced warning system," Shepherd says, pointing to Europe's early warning dissemination systems for climate hazards.He also notes that as weather disasters become more serious in the years to come, experts need to "get the public used to new benchmarks." People may believe they are used to floods in their areas, Shepherd says, but they likely are not used to the severity of those floods—or other disasters—that we're beginning to witness in real-time.</p>
<p>Contact us at [email protected].</p>
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<p>- Texas Officials Question Weather Forecasts Amid Floods</p> <p>Rebecca SchneidJuly 8, 2025 at ...
