#nws

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Weather Service (NWS) has (for now anyways) the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) which is a great source of information to stay weather aware.

The SPC puts out Convective Outlooks. These show where thunderstorms and severe weather have the potential to pop up. (With temperatures warming up, the movement of warm air leads to convection in the atmosphere which results in thunderstorms and sometimes severe weather. There is a good blog post going into more detail here)

Specifically, the outlooks are:

Day 1 Outlook (today and early tomorrow morning)

Day 2 Outlook (the next 24 hours following early tomorrow morning)

Day 3 Outlook (the next 24 hours)

Day 4-8 Outlook (the next days, but these are never too certain due to the way the models work)

These outlooks are timestamped with Zulu time aka Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You can see how that compares to your local timezone here.

Today (3/13/25), the weather outlook is okay, just a slight risk of thunderstorms across the US. However, Friday (3/14/25) and Saturday (3/15/25) both have a widespread risk of severe weather including strong winds and tornadoes.

If you are in any of these colored regions, stay weather aware! Now, this doesn't mean you have to panic, but keep an eye on the weather reports in your area!

I tend to check the SPC in the morning so I know when I have to really be paying attention to the weather for the day/coming days.

then scroll to the bottom of the page and click this link:

this will take you to the forecasters discussion and this is a description from the NWS on what it is:

This National Weather Service product is intended to provide a well-reasoned discussion of the meteorological thinking which went into the preparation of the Zone Forecast Product. The forecaster will try to focus on the most particular challenges of the forecast. The text will be written in plain language or in proper contractions. At the end of the discussion, there will be a list of all advisories, non-convective watches, and non-convective warnings

not only is it written in plain language, but it also contains a glossary and clickable links for certain terms so you can learn what they mean on the fly if you need to better understand the forecast. it’s updated multiple times a day and with increased frequency when there is an extreme weather event impacting the area.

extremely valuable service that the NWS provides and a lot of people don’t know about it. this is the kind of thing that should never ever ever be paywalled. but they want you to pay a subscription fee for it.

like… the NWS is who alerts people about oncoming tornadoes… take that away and now you have thousands of sitting ducks who don’t know that death is barreling toward them. Despite all of the rampant destruction we’ve seen from tornadoes in even the last year alone, deaths from those events have remained in the single digits. Why? Because the NWS and NOAA have worked tirelessly to increase the amount of warning time people have between when a tornado is spotted and when it’s predicted to hit. If I remember correctly, they’ve managed to bring it from seconds of advance warning to up to 16-20 minutes, time that is instrumental in saving lives. Take that away, and now you have people scrambling around trying to figure out what’s happening on their own.

Olivia Troye at Olivia of Troye:

Before we go any further, let me say this: behind every number is a human being. These aren’t just statistics, they’re children, parents, grandparents. Loved ones. Writing this wasn’t easy. Over the last few days, my emotions have swung between heartbreak and fury. What happened in Texas wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was a preventable tragedy. The more I dug into the failures, at every level of government, the angrier I became. Because I want a system of governing, from local to national, that protects all of us, not just the lucky, the wealthy, or the politically aligned. I spent most of my career working inside that system, and I believe in doing everything we possibly can to keep Americans safe. My home state is underwater.

The Texas Hill Country just endured a catastrophic flood, one of the worst in our history. Over a foot of rain fell in six hours. The Guadalupe River surged more than 26 feet above flood stage. Cabins at Camp Mystic were swept away in the dead of night. Helicopters rescued campers. Over 170 people are still missing, and the death toll has climbed to 119. Governor Greg Abbott has warned both numbers may continue to rise. This isn’t just a storm. It’s a policy failure and a warning for every community in the country. Towns across America are experiencing severe flooding, from North Carolina to California, and just this week, Ruidoso, New Mexico, a place I often visited while growing up in the southwest. Imagine being a parent, jolted awake in the blackness of night by the roar of floodwaters. Your phone didn’t ring. The alert never came. By the time headlights flicker through the rain, it’s already too late. That’s what happened in Kerrville, Ingram, and Hunt. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued alerts on Thursday afternoon, but it wasn’t until early morning hours that the urgent flash-flood warnings raised the risk of catastrophic damage and severe threat to life. Kerrville’s mayor said it plainly: “We didn’t even have a warning.” This tragedy reflects a warning system under pressure, stretched thin by rising climate threats, and now facing questions about the timing and effectiveness of its early morning alerts.

Texas Had a Chance to Warn Its People. It Chose Not To.

In the months leading up to the deadly floods, Texas lawmakers had an opportunity to address their broken emergency alert system. They didn’t. House Bill 13, a bipartisan proposal in the Texas Legislature, would have created a statewide emergency response council, supported first responder grants, and, most critically, helped fund outdoor warning sirens and statewide emergency alert systems. It passed the Texas House but was killed in the state Senate earlier this year, mainly over cost concerns. Lawmakers are now left second-guessing their decisions. Republican State Rep. Wes Virdell, who voted against the bill, told The Texas Tribune:

[“My vote would probably be different now… I think even if you had a warning system there, this came in so fast and early in the morning it’s very unlikely the warning system would have had much effect.” ]

But survivors say even a few extra minutes could’ve made the difference between life and death.

A Broken Federal System By Design

While Texas stalled, the federal government under Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the very systems meant to warn and protect Americans. Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump and his allies have raced to dismantle our emergency infrastructure, following the extreme roadmap laid out in Project 2025 (p.166), which calls for ending federal disaster aid, privatizing weather alerts, eliminating resilience grants, and limiting FEMA to only the most catastrophic events. Here’s what Trump’s second term has already put into motion:

Dismantling FEMA- Trump established a FEMA Review Council through an executive order, triggering a strategic reevaluation of the agency's core missions. He has vowed to phase out FEMA entirely after the 2025 hurricane season.

Canceling the BRIC Program- FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants, vital for community preparedness, were terminated in February. That funding could have bolstered Texas’ defenses before the flood.

Quadrupling the Disaster Threshold- Fewer communities now qualify for federal disaster aid. Small towns, like those just hit, could be on their own.

Slashing NOAA and the NWS- On July 4, Trump signed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” slashing $150 million from NOAA and cutting over 800 jobs, including more than 100 forecasters from the NWS. The plan moves us toward outsourcing public weather alerts, potentially opening the door to delayed or paywalled warnings. You know that frustration when you click a news link and can’t read it without a subscription? Now imagine that same wall, but it’s between you and the alert that tells you a flash flood is heading straight for your home. The sky is black, the storm is here, and the warning you need is stuck behind a corporate login.

These cuts delay radar processing, weaken flood modeling, and reduce the lead time families have to seek safety. That’s not hypothetical. That’s exactly what just happened in Texas.

Olivia Troye wrote a very solid piece on how the catastrophic floods that ravaged Texas Hill Country could have been at least somewhat mitigated had better warning systems been in place.

I have two pieces of advice for you that I’m sure you’ve heard before but I want to reiterate.

First, don’t be afraid to cut things out of your writing. Whether it’s a scene that just needs reworked from the bottom up, or if it’s a path the story took that you realize you need to backtrack and go in another direction, don’t let it scare you. The rewritten stuff will likely work even better, since you’ve written what you have and have realized it’s not right.

But second, SAVE WHAT YOU CUT. Seriously. Make a document and save it. Either a separate document for every fic, or one document with headers indicating what each section was cut from, but SAVE IT. Sometimes it’s because even if you needed to rewrite it that doesn’t make it BAD, it just didn’t work for the story you were telling, and sometimes because it’s fun to pick through for stuff you can use in other things, or later in the same story.

This message brought to you by the 4k words of fic that I found labelled “NWS cut stuff” that includes an entirely different ending to ch. 6 and beginning to ch. 7 of one of my most popular fics (nights without sleep and days that burn, if you wanted to know for some reason) that I’d forgotten I’d saved and that I actually really like! It wasn’t the right direction for the story I was telling, I’m glad I went the way I did, but this is still a really solid 4k of writing and I’d forgotten I wrote it and I’m SO glad I saved it and can revisit it!

You’ll thank yourself for doing it one day, if you do. I promise. :)

Love and kisses,