Bread/Milk Alert. Storm of the century tonight!

[SwahiliSteve]

https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1943127992852468213?s=46&t=m_RTTyQoOXCKni9LyjoM3g

Now Durham

[DRYANKNPULL]

Time has come for me to say a few things on this nightmare we've all been living through.  I have purposely waited to say anything to let the search, rescue, recovery, grieving process have time and space. 
 
This lengthy post will also be very therapeutic for me.  Just get things off my chest...  I have cried on multiple occasions.   Early this week in a conversation with my wife in the kitchen, I just suddenly broke down.   I can tell you Amber is my rock and was everything I needed to calm down.

At times, I've been overwhelmed with forecaster regret I could have done more the night before in my weather report.   I now fully understand it.   I attended an AMS chapter meeting where Springfield, MO National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists gave a presentation on their experience with the Joplin Tornado of 2011 that killed 158 people.   I listened to them describe feeling scarred by the disaster.  They asked themselves if their warnings were early enough, strong enough.  The room was very silent through that presentation.  It left a mark on me but you can't fully understand that feeling until you experience it for yourself.

Our local NWS office was absolutely fantastic before and during this event.   I couldn't be more proud of this office for their watches and warnings.  They did their part.   But I'm more than sure they too are feeling the weight of this disaster like the meteorologists in Springfield, MO.   God bless each one of you.
 
As for me, being on-air the night before in my 5pm, 6pm, 10pm weather saying "risk of an epic rainfall, flash flooding" apparently wasn't enough to cause alarm and have word spread through communities impacted.  You only need a couple people to hear what you're saying then it spreads like crazy on social media, etc..  Maybe in my forecast, a portion of it dedicated to 4th of July firework show rain chances muddied the flooding messaging?   These are things bouncing around in my head.   

And today, I'm doing a little better but some of that I believe is a numbing effect of being beat down daily with updated casualty numbers.   It's like my heart bottomed out and can't sink any lower.  I'm just grinding along...

We live in Flash Flood Alley, a nickname given to our part of Texas.  It stretches from the basically the Rio Grande, up the I-35 corridor from San Antonio to DFW.  A devastating combination of elevation change from the gulf to Hill Country, more rocky limestone than mud, terrain with narrow valleys and tropical systems, mere remnants of tropical systems or just non-tropical related thunderstorms sitting over one spot or training over one spot for a lengthy period of time with high rainfall rates. 

Tucked in Flash Flood Alley is arguably the most dangerous valley in the country for flash flooding, the Guadalupe River watershed.  Prime flash flooding setup with outdoor enthusiasts and population along its beautiful riverbanks.

There's the old saying, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink the water".   Well, Mother Nature has led us to water (full of deadly consequences) time & time again and we have yet to fully arm ourselves with layers of protection to warn those along the river.  We put a system up for vote to taxpayers which was rejected.   

IT IS DAMN WELL PAST TIME we have a loud siren system especially in rural portions of the river valley.   Had a system been in place to be activated with a push of a button and a deafening ear piercing alarm had gone off deep in the night when many are asleep.  Even more so when phone signals are weak to nonexistent and some won't have a NOAA weather radio which should be mandatory when other forms of communication are lacking for vital severe weather information.

This was a perfect storm for all the wrong reasons.  Going into a holiday weekend with campers, RVers and families gathered along the river with an occurrence deep in the night when most have shut it down for a night's rest.   An obnoxiously loud siren system could have been a game changer!

Some will say, it was a 100yr flood or even greater.  We won't have to endure it for a long time.  But damn it, history has shown us this river and our surrounding rivers in our region will come calling at some point.   German immigrants in New Braunfels faced the wrath of the river in the 1840s.  Eventually, we built a flood control lake known as Canyon Lake to protect downstream towns.   Lets fully protect upriver to the headwaters now.

San Antonio River took many lives in the early 1900s.  Dams were built and the River Walk was developed to control raging floods.

This is not new.  You can go back centuries or further into the paleoclimatological records to see these rivers can rage.   And there was no "cloud seeding" all those epic floods either for that crowd pushing a false narrative.

Lets not let the tragic loss of so many precious lives be wasted on in-action.   GET IT DONE!!   We should never speak of a nightmare like this ever again especially in 2025.

May God be with all the families devastated by this flood including our community wrapping our collective arms around these families and region impacted 🙏🙏


That's Chris Suchan, local meteorologist to the flood area. These people chose to live/camp/vacation/house children in FLASH FLOOD ALLEY!  Individuals (not political parties,government weather services, tv stations or local law enforcement) have blood on their hands for this. You can't say nobody could have predicted it when it was predicted. If you are at ground zero of flash flood alley, you are responsible for getting children out of harm's way before the predicted flash flood occurs.

[BASS]

Thanks for posting that doc

[The Whyte Boar]

I've got news for the local meteorologist.  If you want people to pay attention the answer is less information and fewer warnings, not more.  You want people to take flash flooding seriously?  Don't break into programming and make robo calls and texts for rainstorms that will flood out cars in low badly draining intersections.  Don't wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me the county is under a severe thunderstorm warning with risk of damaging winds and hail.   

In Texas and our part of the world all of the above is just the background noise of spring and early summer.  Lesson the noise and increase the signal. 

Sirens might be nice, but we're talking about miles and miles of very rural areas.  It ain't gonna fix everything.

[Lurk]

Not that there will ever be another camp there, but they could at least put sirens in campgrounds.

[The Whyte Boar]

That camp has been there since 1926 and it is high dollar with people sending their kids back there generation after generation.  It will be back.

[Son of Spam]

I've got news for the local meteorologist.  If you want people to pay attention the answer is less information and fewer warnings, not more.  You want people to take flash flooding seriously?  Don't break into programming and make robo calls and texts for rainstorms that will flood out cars in low badly draining intersections.  Don't wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me the county is under a severe thunderstorm warning with risk of damaging winds and hail.   

In Texas and our part of the world all of the above is just the background noise of spring and early summer.  Lesson the noise and increase the signal. 

Sirens might be nice, but we're talking about miles and miles of very rural areas.  It ain't gonna fix everything.

They could also quit showing and talking about their "toys." They have to show how high the clouds are, wind shear, lightning strikes. I don't need to know that. I need to know where the storm is and where it is headed. That's all.

[Natty_Ice]

if they do install sirens, they'll want to "test" them weekly like they do the tornado sirens in some parts of the country and that's just annoying AF.

[BleedinRed]

And the sirens will be going off every time it rains.  How could they not?

[GeoHogsGeo]

Here is a challenge for the arm-chair meteorologists around. Take a dry maple leaf. Stick it on a nice flowing stream like the one shown. Now tell us EXACTLY where that maple leaf will be downstream in 30 minutes. Tell us precisely where the maple leaf is so we can warn all the fish underneath it.
The disturbance in the atmosphere that causes our severe weather is like the maple leaf flowing within our atmospheric river. That is the challenge forecasters deal with. The fluidity of the atmosphere and the physics involved don't always play out like we anticipate. Multiple levels within out atmosphere (Macro down to the microscale) all play a crucial role in what will come together dynamically to produce severe conditions. Each level, even the slightest deviation can cause a ripple effect and drastically change the anticipated conditions.

You cannot view this attachment. 

[Lurk]

Here is a challenge for the arm-chair meteorologists around. Take a dry maple leaf. Stick it on a nice flowing stream like the one shown. Now tell us EXACTLY where that maple leaf will be downstream in 30 minutes. Tell us precisely where the maple leaf is so we can warn all the fish underneath it.
The disturbance in the atmosphere that causes our severe weather is like the maple leaf flowing within our atmospheric river. That is the challenge forecasters deal with. The fluidity of the atmosphere and the physics involved don't always play out like we anticipate. Multiple levels within out atmosphere (Macro down to the microscale) all play a crucial role in what will come together dynamically to produce severe conditions. Each level, even the slightest deviation can cause a ripple effect and drastically change the anticipated conditions.

You cannot view this attachment. 

It's not that they can't forecast severe weather, they're actually getting to where they can accurately predict the shit four and five days out. What they can't do is tell me tomorrow's forecast accurately. This new capability gives the local weather guys and online guys several days to build up dread in the population. For what, I don't know. It's not like you can board up your windows for a tornado.

Super computers have closed the gap on a lot of it. Storm chasers seem to have it figured out for the most part. They don't wind up in the perfect place to film them by accident. If you want to see if you're in a bad spot for severe weather, look up the stormchaser map and see where they're all clustered up. If you see Pecos Hank at the end of your driveway, you're fucked.

[GeoHogsGeo]

You forecast through what is called the "funnel" effect. You work from the macro and go down to the micro. What is the steering flow? What air mass am I dealing with? The list continues and increases when looking for severe parameters. Forecast accuracy has improved tremendously...even in the last 20 years, the improvements have been staggering in comparison to just the late 80's. But it is still not perfect.

People have to realize that once you are down to the micro and trying to understand all the local effects that can pivot things dramatically. A few outflow boundaries from thunderstorms can drastically change the low level convergent flow which can drastically change where new cells pop up.

AS for the chasers, look at them leading up to it the event. At the start, dollars to donuts, they are clustered in multiple counties. As things start kicking off, sure, you will see them all come together.
They don't have the name "CHASER" in their name for nothing. They have to go find the storms.
Those storms that caused all the flooding in Texas just needed a county or two geographical positioning change and we are discussing a different outcome.

[Lurk]

As soon as the weather service gets a quantum computer, it will improve the weather models that all the meteorologists use. The latest radars have changed the game and people are just now learning all the bells and whistles.

Regarding the floods. At the end of the day, shit happens.

[The Whyte Boar]

There is a lot of bullshit about this mess.  It's hard to see how any warning would have worked.

Case in point.  Tiktok videos from a couple who evacuated.  It was early morning daylight and raining cats and dogs.  They are evacuating their campground.  Wife is filming while husband gets camper hooked up.  River is swollen and up but still within the banks.  RV is ten fifteen yards out of the water.  By the time they pull out, water is practically lapping at the back of it.  They get out of the campground and are on the road a that is a little bit up and runs alongside the river for a bit.  The camper in that was in the spot next to them goes floating down the river passing them.  The husband says something like "That was so and so's camper.  He was right next to us."  As they travel out they pass dozens if not hundreds of other campers, cars, tents, and people who were seemingly putzing around putting their shit up who did not seem to appreciate the danger.

But even had everyone dropped everything and tried to hit the road, I'm not sure it would have mattered.  There would have been a traffic jam and they would have been caught.  There were so many people there that had they tried to get everyone out at midnight, there would have been people who couldn't have made it out by the next morning. 

These people in this video were fully aware.  They acted with alacrity.  And still they damned near got caught. 

I don't think a siren system will work unless it is known that when it goes off, it is time to drop everything and run, not get in your car, but immediately run to higher ground.

As stated in this thread, they wouldn't use it that way.  They would overuse it.  There would be false alarms.  They would use it when people had hours to get out and so on and so forth.

[GeoHogsGeo]

As soon as the weather service gets a quantum computer, it will improve the weather models that all the meteorologists use. The latest radars have changed the game and people are just now learning all the bells and whistles.

Regarding the floods. At the end of the day, shit happens.

There is no question improvements are coming with AI and quantum computing in regards to understanding the thermal and fluid dynamics of our atmosphere.

Phased array radar has reduced volume scan times. And more base and derived products keep getting developed.

Phased Array

[Sus-Scrofa]

If yall are going to keep nerding out, you're going to have to use more pictures for the rest of us.

[buff2.0]

If yall are going to keep nerding out, you're going to have to use more pictures for the rest of us.

I don't think there's enough crayons in the state to explain complex weatherology to me.  It gets hot, it gets cold.  If it tries to do both at the same time, it storms.  That's about it.

[arreferee]

I'd like to know what percentage of tornado warnings end up with actual tornadoes on the ground.  When I was a kid, if a tornado warning was announced, that meant there was a tornado sighted in the county and to take cover.  Now, it seems like we have tornado warnings all the time and very few actually end up as tornadoes. 

[The Whyte Boar]

Twenty-six feet in 45 minutes.  Forecasting isn't going to forecast that. 

[buff2.0]

I'd like to know what percentage of tornado warnings end up with actual tornadoes on the ground.  When I was a kid, if a tornado warning was announced, that meant there was a tornado sighted in the county and to take cover.  Now, it seems like we have tornado warnings all the time and very few actually end up as tornadoes. 

Back in the spring there was one night that the news talked about 4 or 5 separate "tornado-warned storms" in a small area where I know several farmers.  I called them all the next morning, because I'm selfish and hoped I could sell them new equipment on insurance claims, and each of them said they had no damage and had very little wind or rain the night before.