And a timelapse of the storm (lots of flashing lights because lightning - be aware)

CYS and RIW are both actually down - some kind of comms outage. Other offices in the region are backing them up.

And the back up office system has existed long before this whole mess of a year.

I don’t know - it may depend on the office, really. There are some offices that cover pretty rural areas and could get by with larger staff cuts. Other “back up” offices can and have stepped in to help share some of the workload in busy times like severe weather.

And here’s it in slow mo.

As well as the fact that it was such an extreme rainfall event in a very flash flood prone area.
This was going to be a disaster even with the adequate warnings.

Can imagine it being a busy summer holiday weekend, a lot of out of town visitors (who may not know about how dangerous the river is), and it happening in the middle of the night all played a big role in this.

Yeah the warnings would have gone out on NOAA weather radio. I’m sure there’s going to be extensive analysis into what went wrong and it’s likely going to be a very long list of things because there’s rarely ever one reason things like these happen.

A lot of staffing shortages (including MIC, WCM, and hydrologist vacancies) were around before January 2025. It’s definitely gotten worse but it was never really great to begin with.

Those are important jobs and they should be filled, don’t get me wrong, the cuts that are happening are terrible. But a forecast office isn’t completely crippled and unable to do its job because they don’t have those slots filled.

They also have to know how to communicate effectively with the public and emergency managers. Because the WCM and hydrologist can’t be in the office and on shift 24/7.

Let me just put it this way: there is a TON of overlap of roles in an NWS office. It’s very much a team effort to run an office. When I say “an NWS Met wears a lot of hats” I mean they have to be an expert on flash floods, severe storms, winter storms, fire weather, etc.

The course goes over tornadoes and severe storms but it also extensively covers both flash flood forecasting and warnings since radar plays a huge role in flash flood warning operations. The workshop is basically simulating forecasting and warning for these things for like four days straight.

However, every NWS meteorologist is extensively trained in flash flood forecasting and warnings as it’s considered “severe weather”. Every meteorologist goes through something called the Radar Applications Course which is a 6 month long course that ends in a week long in-person workshop.

The hydrologist handles a lot of the routine forecasts for rivers, drought, etc.

I won’t say there haven’t been a few times on shift where I’ve called our hydrologist to ask for their opinion on issuing a river flood warning. Mainly because we don’t deal with a lot of flooding out here.

Yeah - the MIC is the boss of the office. They handle a lot of the administrative stuff (managing staff, verifying time sheets, etc) and they’re important to the office but honestly they don’t play a huge role in warning operations (unless they’re on shift).

So while NWS San Antonio may not have had a WCM … they *definitely* would have had someone working in operations that night who had the task of calling up the emergency managers and letting them know of the danger. Because it’s one of the many job duties of an NWS meteorologist.

And so during severe weather operations - there would most certainly be someone on duty whose task would be contacting emergency managers in the areas being impacted by dangerous weather. It’s not just the job of the Warning Coordination Meteorologist.