The deadly floods on the Texas-Mexico border point out an old problem for Texans: the need for timely warning of severe weather while there's still a chance to get out of its way.

Del Rio had a few unusual advantages. It has an Air Force training base with weather watchers and a weather radar, an additional federal weather radar to the north in San Angelo and one to the southeast in Brackettville, and two automated observation sites that report conditions hourly to the National Weather Service's forecast center in New Braunfels.

The forecast center was able to issue its first flood warnings for Del Rio at 9:10 a.m. Sunday, based on reports of swamped low-water crossings, and to extend them with ever-stronger language about evacuations and life-threatening conditions until well after midnight. Weather service officials said the worst of the flooding began between 9 and 10 p.m.

Most places in Texas have far fewer means of escaping disaster. Only 45 of the state's 254 counties have federal weather observation sites, either staffed or automated.

Some Texas scientists hope to begin changing that this week, when they ask the state Public Utility Commission to raise electric rates to pay for the first complete statewide weather monitoring system by 2002. "There would be at least one automated weather instrument site in every county," said John Nielsen-Gammon, an associate professor of meteorology at Texas A&M University and one of the organizers of the proposed system.

"It's too expensive to put a radar in every county, but you can augment the ones we have with (automated) observations," Nielsen-Gammon said. "The National Weather Service would love to do it, but they have to scramble for money from Congress just to maintain the current setup."

The proposed weather network is called the Texas MesoNet, a reference to mesoscale, a meteorological term meaning a weather event extending from 1 to 1,000 kilometers in area.

The idea, which arose in 1995 at the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, when officials watched Oklahoma put in a similar system, is being pushed by the Lower Colorado River Authority and coordinated by meteorologists at Texas A&M and Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

The National Weather Service also likes the idea of having one or more weather observation sites in every Texas county to monitor air temperature, humidity, precipitation, prevailing winds, amount of sunlight, ground temperatures and moisture content in soil.

The automated sites would report the information hourly, as federal observation sites do now, to regional centers where the data could be analyzed and passed on to whoever needed the information.

Once the system is up and running, its information would be free to the weather service and the public.

"We'd love to have a system with that kind of dense information," said Larry Eblin, a meteorologist with the weather service's Austin and San Antonio forecast office in New Braunfels. "Our forecast models would be far better than they are right now, especially in areas where there's not so many gauges or people to call for information."

Eblin said the weather service now relies in many places on volunteers such as ham radio operators, police officers and sheriff's deputies to add additional visual information to what regional radar and instruments can gather.

"We're bigger than other states and we have more Nexrad radars than any other state,"Nielsen-Gammon said. "But the coverage tends to be better where the population is denser."

Nielsen-Gammon said the weather service operates nine Nexrad weather radars in Texas and has information-sharing agreements with additional radar centers at military bases. P> Despite their impressive performance on television news, however, radars can't do it alone.

Scientists say automated instruments such as rain gauges are necessary to augment even Nexrad radar estimates of rainfall rates. Research has found that intervening terrain may block the radars and rain often occurs at lower levels of the atmosphere than those at which the radars are aimed.

The primary beneficiaries of Texas MesoNet are expected to be farmers and other agriculture producers. The system could improve plans for planting, irrigating and harvesting.

Local power companies also would be able to better determine the power consumption needs of a region by pinpointing hotter or colder areas. Scientists hope that will persuade the Public Utility Commission to use electric rates to finance the network.

"The cost would be a few pennies more on utility bills," Nielsen-Gammon said. "But we fully expect it to save energy costs in the long run, improve food production and improve public safety."

This web site is maintained by Thomas John Petroski