Texas floods

MSNBC -  At least 161 people are missing after catastrophic floods tore through the Texas Hill Country, Gov. Greg Abbott said yesterday, as the desperate search for survivors continues. The death toll rose to at least 110 people.

Meanwhile, scrutiny and questions are mounting about how and when people in the area received flash flood alerts. Among those questions: What actions were taken to notify residents? Were emergency alerts adequate, and who issued them? It was also unclear whether alerts were received on all phones. At a news conference yesterday, local officials and law enforcement in Kerr County couldn't provide basic details of the emergency response.

While National Weather Service forecasters had warned broadly about flash flooding ahead of time, the best weather models could not have predicted precisely where the most intense rainfall would land, or that the deluge would stall out over a flood-prone basin, meteorologists and forecasting experts said. Texas state climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon called such a prediction "next to impossible."

What did happen was that "all the ingredients came together at the wrong place, at the wrong time, at night on a holiday weekend," said David Gagne, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist. Though NOAA is working to build better weather models, that research is on the chopping block.  MORE