Through the middle of the year, there is probably not a bigger weather story than the flooding in central Texas, particularly around Kerrville that claimed the lives of over 100 souls, including many at a youth camp along the Guadalupe River. There is a political story out there as well, involving the reduction in force at the National Weather Service, thanks to a drastic reduction in science funding from the administration. It’s easy to draw lines between the two stories, but it isn’t quite as clear as that.
A structural problem with meteorology and forecasting is the ability both to disseminate warnings properly and have potentially affected persons heed those warnings. As has been widely reported, flash flood warnings were issued several hours in advance of the floods, but the warnings came in the middle of the night to a part of the world that receives warnings all the time. Nevertheless, dangerous weather was expected, and meteorologists did what they could to try to get warnings out.
Before I dig into the issues that enhanced the natural disasters tragedy, I do want to reassure anyone who will listen. The post will not be abandoned in times of duress. For example, tonight there is a risk of severe weather in the northern Plains, and offices that may have lost staff, like Aberdeen or Grand Forks will reallocate their resources to ensure that they are fully staffed through the duration of any severe outbreak that goes on. There will be support for other offices in the region. This is meteorologists banding together despite the headwinds against them.
The issue is a longstanding issue particularly with meteorology and broadly with human nature. Models don’t yet have the resolution to go house to house or even neighborhood to neighborhood in our forecasting or even our weather reporting. Remember earlier this month about the tornado striking Victoria, Minnesota? I still have family in town, and they said that nobody in town was talking about it. The twister was only a few hundred feet wide, and left 95% of the town unscathed.
Because of the nature of weather, communication and geography, there isn’t a good way to reduce the area of a warning to specify only those who will definitely be impacted by a weather event. As a result, even when bad weather occurs, most people in an area feel their warning may have been unwarranted, as did nearly all of Victoria, if they looked only at their front yard after an actual tornado passed through their city limits. This leads to a severe “boy who called wolf” attitude about weather warnings across the population.
Improving the definition of models, as well as seeking the best way to disseminate warnings is a joint effort of meteorologists, programmers and social scientists. This is the work that is arrested during the funding freeze from Washington. The immediate warnings may or may not suffer, but they certainly aren’t going to get better.
Additionally, while the reduction of force is a problem in itself, the specific type of person that lost their job exasperates the structural problems in meteorology. Probationary – young – employees were let go across the NWS and NOAA. There is going to be a gap of people who had been in NOAA for a few years, and through the end of this budgetary restriction, with no new blood, no new ideas. The advances will not only cease, but in a few years, that’s when regression really begins. It’s going to be tough to avoid.
It’s probably too soon to say that the tragedy along the Guadalupe River was a direct result of the layoffs at NOAA, but it is quite appropriate to point out that the Administration is in no position to address the shortcomings that magnified this tragedy, and it likely won’t be for a very long time.
