In Texas, the state -of -the -art weather forecasts reached their limits when Trump decreases budget

Modern weather forecasts have never been so precise, but they still have their limits.

The intensive precipitation, which left the flood through central texas last week, and even some Texas civil servants with the severity have the challenge to predict the heaviest storms and what the best weather models cannot deliver in strict focus.

“There is an expectation that a disaster like this predicted hours or days in advance, and that is simply not the case,” said Alan Gerard, former director of the branch for analysis and understanding of the National Great Storms Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Models “can basically show that there will be areas with intensive rainfall, but they rarely take exactly to the right place.”

The efforts to close this rift are at risk. Climate change increases the frequency of extreme precipitation and improves the models even urgently. Noaa is working on improving the forecasting tools to better predict the intensity of the rainfall and the precise location. The latest budget request from the Trump administration for the agency, which suggests reducing the budget by more than 2 billion US dollars, would hire a large part of the agency’s serious storm research.

While the forecasts of the National Weather Service warned in advance about flooding in central texas, the Texas state John Nielsen-Gammon said that the best weather models could not predict exactly where the most intense precipitation would fall or that the flood was over a flood-prone basin.

“With today’s technology, it would have been almost impossible to do the internal dynamics of the storm correctly,” said Nielsen-Gammon, which is the key to determining whether a storm would break out. In this case, Nielsen-Gammon said that 3 to 4 inches were before recognizing before the system was stood and that such an intensive flood above the southern fork in the Guadalup River, where the most intense destruction ultimately occurred.

“If you look at the radar map, for example 1 a.m., there were things everywhere,” said Nielsen-Gammon about the region’s scattered storms. “You wouldn’t have excellent Kerr County.”

Noaa and his academic partners are working to develop better tools to predict fall floods. David Gagne, a national center for atmospheric research scientists who focuses on improving machine learning to improve the weather models, develops artificial intelligence algorithms to improve short -term forecast accuracy.

Gagne said that Noaa has already developed another tool that increases the lead time for fall floods called warning-on forecast system, but it is not yet ready for prognostics with the national weather service.

The Trump administration’s budget application for NOAA in the 2026 financial year would not hold onto the warning-on-for-forecast system and the research laboratories of the agency, which drive the forecasting innovation.

“All NOAA research results would be eliminated with a few small programmatic exceptions. All of this work to improve the various forecast warnings within the NOAA would be as good as ending,” said Gerard.

At the moment, the best available tools can provide sufficient warning about a general threat to the flood floods, but localized floods can only be predicted if real-time radar and sensor tools can determine the precipitation rates.

“Reality is for floods in floods at risk of flooding. You should think about how you do a tornado,” said Gerard. “We cannot tell you that your specific place will be hit in the same way as we cannot tell you that your specific place will be hit by a tornado.”

Scientists expect more intensive precipitation events because the human use of fossil fuels heats the atmosphere and makes the quality of the weather models even more important.

With every warming in fahrenheit, the atmosphere can keep about 3% to 4% more moisture. According to NOAA data, the global temperatures in 2024 were about 2.32 degrees higher than on average of the 20th century.

“Rain occurs when you have a really damp air package on the surface and it rises in the atmosphere and cools down. Think of a sponge full of water and you start squeezing, waning off the sponge and the water fails,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A & M University. “There is more water in the sponge in a warmer atmosphere. So if you get out, you will fall more water.”

While climate change increases the likelihood of extreme rainfall, it should have no effect on the accuracy of weather models, since they rely on real-time weather observations and the basic, underlying physics that determine the interactions between all types of matter. The laws of physics are impermeable to climate change.

“You use input data that have climate change,” said Dessler. “It is recorded.”

In Texas, higher temperatures have already been translated into more intensive rainfall. In a report from 2024, Nielsen-Gammon found that the “extreme one-day precipitation” had increased by 5% to 15% since the late 20th century. By 2036 he expected an additional increase of about 10% with extreme precipitation intensity.

This article was originally published on nbcnews.com