Climate Disasters Like Texas Floods Moving Faster Than Science Can Keep Up

Extreme weather events like flash flooding in Texas are pushing the limits of climate modelling because scientists don’t have the data to keep up.

Climate experts said Tuesday they will need more time to crunch what data they have for an event so unusual, and for which there is little precedent.

The Guadalupe River in central Texas rose more than six metres in a few hours last weekend, causing a flash flood that killed more than 150 people, many of them children, with another 160 people still missing.

Rapid attribution specialist Dr. Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, told reporters that rapid events happening in a matter of hours will take scientists longer to analyse since most of the data they have tracks rainfall over days, not hours.

Otto, who was part of a panel of experts brought together by Climate Central to discuss climate connection to the devastating floods, said there aren’t many historical examples for comparison purposes.

She said this area is one of the few regions in the world where researchers actually saw no changes in daily rainfall amounts, but they now need more research and expensive “hyper solution” modelling to be better prepared for what is coming.

“If we continue on this path—we are at 1.3°C of warming now—this will happen more often,” she said.

“Europe had done a lot of the models, but we now have to be prepared for these 1% events,” Otto added. “The United States has always been a place where we could study this, but if the U.S. is falling away from funding this, that would have a huge impact.”

Shel Winkley, meteorologist and weather and climate engagement specialist for Climate Central in Texas, said rainfall events in the area are getting about 19% heavier.

Winkley said moisture from the Gulf of Mexico created the storm that led to about 25 to 38 centimetres of rainfall on Kerr County alone. According to Climate Central, “large amounts of moisture in the air fueled the storm that moved slowly—dumping what is estimated to be more than 100 billion gallons of water, more than the daily flow over Niagara Falls.”

Prolonged, exceptional drought contributed to the dangerous conditions on the ground, Winkley added, in a region already known as “flash flood alley.”

He said the floodwaters and debris destroyed many of the flood gauges in the area, further hampering data collection that could be used for analysis and modelling.

Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist and climate matters director for Climate Central ,said a lot of the advanced science is “at risk of being pulled back” due to deep funding cuts by the Trump administration.

“This is a time we need more data, science, and scientists so we can better understand how this changing planet is impacting our daily lives and what we can do about it,” she said.

A study published in the journal Natural Hazards in 2021 found that people of colour and those living in mobile homes are disproportionately exposed to flooding, especially in rural areas and in the southern U.S.

Children are among the most vulnerable to the physical, mental, and emotional health impacts of flooding, according to the study.

“If we keep burning fossil fuels, we will probably see, even in the regions of the world where the climate change signal and daily rainfall hasn’t emerged yet, it will happen,” said Otto.

“So it’s really something we have to be prepared for.”

Cover photo:  Olivia of Troye/Substack