SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — Meteorologists, hurricane experts and emergency operations managers met in Texas to get ready for the upcoming hurricane season.
They're all at the National Tropical Weather Conference in South Padre Island. People from all along the Texas coast, as well as many from other states, brought their knowledge together to prepare ahead of this year’s hurricane season.
Much of the conversation on Wednesday centered around evacuations and the need to be much more focused and specific about who would need to evacuate and when. That evacuation discussion is largely centered around storm surge. That's the part of the storm that can be the most dangerous for those living along the coastline, bays and bayous.
As storms come ashore, they push water from the Gulf of Mexico inland, creating damaging storm surge.
This year, the National Hurricane Center is utilizing new technology to help better predict not only the intensity of storm surge but also what areas could be impacted more.
One of the people in charge of that forecast is Dr. Cody Fritz, a storm surge specialist and the team lead for the National Hurricane Center.
“I think people think we just forecast storm surge so when a hurricane makes landfall, we provide a forecast for you,” he said. “We do a lot more than that. Behind the scenes, we do a lot of research and development on the same modeling that we use to forecast storm surge. We’re all about trying to understand the risk, how vulnerable the coastline is and trying to capture and illustrate that vulnerability and present it to people.”
There’s another full day on Thursday. At 9 a.m., the 2024 hurricane forecast from Colorado State University will be released from South Padre Island. It’ll be our first chance to hear what could be happening this hurricane season.
We’ll stream that forecast live on KHOU.com and KHOU 11+.