Trying to Make Sense of the Unspeakable Texas Tragedy
Catastrophic flooding in the Texas Hill Country over the holiday weekend is one of the deadliest in modern memory. How did it happen?
Author’s note: The taxpayer-funded tools from NOAA I consulted to provide the forecast information and analyses in today’s newsletter include wind analyses from the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and flash flood guidance from the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System (MRMS) developed by the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Oklahoma. All of these critical tools that inform hurricane forecasts and associated flood threats are slated for elimination in NOAA’s 2026 proposed budget.
The catastrophic flooding that ripped through parts of the Texas Hill Country along the Guadalupe River northwest of San Antonio during the predawn hours on July 4th quickly turned into an unspeakable tragedy, killing at least 82 people, including 28 children. It’s already one of the deadliest U.S. floods in modern memory, with search and rescue efforts continuing for the dozens still missing.
For an in-depth analysis of the factors behind the flooding, I encourage you to read these weekend posts from colleagues Matt Lanza at The Eyewall and Alan Gerard at Balanced Weather.
Putting the pieces together
The tropical connection to the tragic events in Kerr County can be tracked back to the remnants of short-lived Tropical Storm Barry, which moved inland over Mexico from the southern Gulf as a tropical depression last Monday. Though Barry’s remnants didn’t cause the flooding last Friday, its feed of tropical-laden air into Central Texas last week set the stage.
Like a waterlogged sponge perched precariously overhead, all the atmosphere needed was a catalyst to wring out the extreme levels of water vapor. That came late Thursday into Friday when a swirling area of clouds – the last vestiges of a large thunderstorm complex from Thursday morning over the Texas Big Bend – collided with the tropically rich air to the east. These ghosts of big, land-generated thunderstorm systems – rotating cloud systems known as Mesoscale Convective Vortexes or MCVs –can resemble a small tropical cyclone over land and occasionally move over water and spawn tropical storms and hurricanes (see July 4th’s Hurricane Arthur in 2014).
Like the Predecessor Rain Event or PRE that contributed to the extreme rainfall associated with Helene in western North Carolina last September, MCVs are notorious for triggering extreme rainfall and Friday’s event was a textbook example of it.
What’s not to blame for the Texas floods
In the days and weeks after any heartbreaking disaster, we search for answers. How could this happen? Who’s to blame? Learning from disaster, after all, is how we protect against them in the future.
We owe it to the families and lives impacted by this heartbreaking tragedy to not rush to judgement, and the copious misinformation is problematic and an unwelcome distraction for everyone. Here’s what we can say confidently weren’t to blame for the floods.
National Weather Service – NWS staff both nationally and at the local field office between San Antonio and Austin performed admirably, giving all the heads up you’d expect for a hyper-local event like this. Flood Watches were hoisted over 12 hours in advance of the start of the flooding and flash flood warnings were issued hours before the worst hit. The “considerable” tag the NWS office added to these early warnings also would’ve triggered Wireless Emergency Alerts to cell phones in the area (for those able to receive them). The early warnings were followed up with more extreme flood alerts, including a Flash Flood Emergency for parts of Kerr County, including Hunt, at 4:03 AM CT.
NOAA/NWS budget cuts – Though many local NWS field offices are short-staffed from DOGE-directed cuts and compelled early resignations, the local field office in New Braunfels implemented what they call “surge staffing” – a standard NWS protocol when severe weather is anticipated – leading up to the event. This means the office actually had more staff working the event than it would’ve on more typical weather days, upping its on-duty staff from two to five ahead of the storms, according to the Associated Press.
Defense weather satellite data outages – The microwave data we reported on that’s critical to hurricane forecasts, originally slated for elimination last week, isn’t used in an operational capacity for hyper-local flash flood events like what happened in Texas. Additionally, access to the Department of Defense weather satellite data was granted a moratorium until the end of July, so the data is still flowing for now.
Digging deeper for answers
It’ll take time to unpack all the ingredients of this deadly flood, but from the meteorology side of things, this was well forecast and warnings were issued as far in advance as one could reasonably expect for a flood event like this. The more likely contributor was the timing of the deadly river rise: in the dark of night on a holiday weekend when local campgrounds on the river banks were teeming with campers.
Some states, including North Carolina, have invested in so-called flood mesonets in the wake of deadly floods of the past to get real-time flood mapping to emergency managers as it’s occurring. I recently spoke to officials in Florida who are looking to replicate this kind of real-time flood mapping system statewide in collaboration with local universities.
The terrible events in Texas the past few days do serve as a salient reminder of why NOAA-developed tools and National Weather Service forecasts are so critical to this country. One of the primary tools we use to predict flash floods like the ones in Central Texas come from the Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor System, a project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory or NSSL in Norman, Oklahoma. I’ve zero doubt NWS forecasters were leveraging that tool that evening to issue flash flood warnings. The National Severe Storms Laboratory and associated projects like this one are slated for elimination in NOAA’s proposed 2026 budget, which would be detrimental to our ability to forecast these types of deadly floods in the future.
Chantal caps a weekend of flooding in the Carolinas
Tropical Storm Chantal formed Saturday morning about 150 miles off the coast of South Carolina, moving ashore early Sunday as a moderate tropical storm. Winds gusted to as high as 56 mph along the South Carolina coast near Myrtle Beach, with gusts as high as 47 mph in the Charleston area on Sunday.
As we previewed in newsletters last week, however, it was the heavy rainfall that was the calling card of Chantal, with radar-estimated rainfall totals approaching a foot or more in the area just west of the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle in North Carolina. The Haw River reached major flood stage shortly before 5 AM ET Monday, only inches below the gauge’s record set during Hurricane Fran in 1996 (at Bynum, the Haw River appears to have broken Fran’s record).
The flood threat from the now remnants of Chantal will spread into parts of the Mid-Atlantic today, including areas east of Washington D.C. into southeastern Pennsylvania and southern Maryland.
Mostly quiet week ahead in the Atlantic
Behind Chantal, things continue to look quiet this week across the Atlantic, with no development expected in the days ahead.
In the weeks after nearly 1400 people perished in New Orleans during the levee breaches of Hurricane Katrina, nearly all the information on what caused the catastrophe was wrong. Blame doesn't belong to the storm, city geography or local officials. It belongs to the US Army Corps of Engineers for their poor design and construction of the levees. Bottom line, don't rush to judgement on who is to blame. It could take months, even years to determine.
Michael, things might be calm for the next few days, but ECENS have 6 members developing a tropical cyclone and pointing it toward Houston; another potential tragedy in the making. Yr. thoughts?