NOAA’s National Weather Forecast
Office

NOAA’s National Weather Forecast<br>Office

Field Trip to NOAA’s National Weather Forecast
Office

“Is it going to rain today? I need to pick up my meds, and I hate to drive in the rain.”
“Is it going to be windy tomorrow? We’re doing a prescribed burn and don’t want it get out of
control.”
“I’m getting married next month. Should we have an indoor or outdoor wedding?”
These are the sorts of calls fielded by the 20 employees at NOAA’s National Weather Forecast
Office located near the New Braunfels airport. This office serves 33 Texas counties in the
Austin-San Antonio region, and on September 17 there were 11 of us in the MN program lucky
enough to be the first to visit the facility since COVID called a halt to public tours two and one-
half years ago.


We learned that the center is the rare federal agency that answers calls 24/7, but its main job,
according to Paul Jura, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist who led our tour, is weather
forecasting and emergency warning to protect lives and property. The center assembles all
public and private weather data available, filtering it through weather prediction models and
adding a dash of meteorologists’ experience to create a forecast locals can depend on.
Some of the gems that intrigued and surprised us:

  • Lightening can strike 10 miles from a thunderstorm, which is why pools are evacuated
    even before it rains.
  • In the event of a tornado, severe thunderstorm or flash flood, one of the office’s
    meteorologists can press a button to send a warning to cell towers in the affected area,
    thereby triggering emergency notifications to cell phones.
  • The NOAA meteorologists compare notes with local TV meteorologists in their private
    chat room.
  • When a raindrop falls, it doesn’t look like the tear drop we imagine. Instead, it is shaped
    like a hamburger bun.
  • Wind speed is measured 33’ off the ground, hail falls at 100 mph, and recorded
    temperatures are taken in the shade.
  • Weather balloons are launched two times per day from 60 sites around the country.
    They provide data for weather models by sending signals every two seconds to ground
    stations.


The New Braunfels office has one of only 155 Doppler radar sites in the U.S. It takes an
experienced meteorologist to distinguish tornadoes and precipitation worth noting from
bat flights, butterfly migrations, and 18-wheelers passing each other on IH-35.


Notwithstanding his decades of weather-predicting experience, Paul Jura wryly notes that his
mother-in-law swears by the Weather app on her phone. As they sit side-by-side on the sofa,
she will consult her phone and then announce to him that it’s going to rain tomorrow—because
her phone says so.