![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Elizabeth-Chapa-5-1-840x560.jpg\")
Elizabeth Chapa presents her final project to the GEO 347G class in December 2025. Her instructor, Research Scientist Edward Vizy, is seen in the foreground. Credit: Jackson School<\/p>\nJune 24, 2026<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\tElizabeth Chapa presents her final project to the GEO 347G class in December 2025. Her instructor, Research Scientist Edward Vizy, is seen in the foreground. Credit: Jackson School<\/p>\n
Last fall, a group of 12 students huddled around their laptops in a dark room in the Jackson School of Geosciences building. Their screens, which displayed colorful\u00a0swirls\u00a0over a map of Central Texas, emitted a jolt of color into the space. Most of them had never done climate modeling before. And as residents of Central Texas, their first project hit close to home. They were all dedicated to modeling the same extreme weather event: the July 4, 2025\u00a0rainstorm that had so utterly devastated the Texas Hill Country only a few months prior.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This storm caused catastrophic flooding that killed at least 139 people, 37 of whom were children. Even for people who hadn\u2019t lost a friend or family member in the flood, this weather event loomed large in the students\u2019 memory, and the project carried emotional weight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the assignment was announced, Elizabeth Chapa, who at the time was a third-year climate system science major, immediately called her parents to tell them what she\u2019d be working on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI get to apply what we\u2019re learning to something that\u2019s happening in the real world \u2014 something that affected so many different people,\u201d Chapa said, recalling how she felt at the time. \u201cAll across Texas, this was a huge deal.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Edward\u00a0Vizy, a research scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, teaches GEO 347G \u201cClimate System Modeling\u201d once every couple of years.\u00a0Typically\u00a0he lets students decide the weather event that they\u2019ll be modeling over the course of the class. But after this summer storm devastated an area so near The University of Texas at Austin campus and so dear to many students, he decided to dedicate the class to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure many of the students were in the area, and they certainly know the aftermath of it. I thought it was a very relevant case to look at,\u201d Vizy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the class set out to understand the climatological factors that made this rainstorm so severe, what they discovered was that the storm in fact\u00a0could\u00a0have been worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a paper published recently in\u00a0Geophysical Research Letters<\/a>, Vizy and Jackson School of Geosciences Professor Kerry Cook analyzed the class\u2019s work and discovered that above-average sea surface temperatures weakened an air current known as the Great Plains low-level jet, thus weakening this enormous rainstorm.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Had sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico been at the 40-year average for this week in early July, the researchers estimate that rainfall totals could have been 5-8% higher over Central Texas. (Vizy said it would take further work to quantify how exactly this would have impacted flood levels.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures reduced the contrast between land and ocean temperatures, and this slowed down the jet. The Great Plains low-level jet is a fast-moving current of air that curves from the Gulf of Mexico over Texas, the Great Plains, and eastern United States. As the jet stream\u2019s winds hit the\u00a0higher terrain of the Texas Hill Country, they are forced upward, triggering a mechanism that\u00a0can cause\u00a0storms to develop\u00a0and intensify. A weaker low-level jet means weaker storms and less\u00a0intense\u00a0rainfall.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are many factors that contribute to how a storm develops. Vizy and\u00a0Cook\u00a0concentrated on the storm\u2019s relationship to sea surface temperatures and soil moisture because it can inform the prediction of future storms.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, soil moisture \u2014 these surface conditions are more persistent than the storm itself.\u00a0So\u00a0it gives you a leg up on predictability,\u201d Cook said. \u201cWe say, \u2018there\u2019s memory there.\u2019 That\u2019s what can help with lead times.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The models the GEO 347G class and the researchers ran are very similar to models that forecasters run for weather prediction. Cook said that forecasters and climate scientists at the Austin\/San Antonio office for the National Weather Service will see the results from this study; her hope is that\u00a0it will help them better understand the role of\u00a0the Great Plains low-level jet\u00a0in storm development\u00a0when predicting future storms.\u00a0<\/p>\n Soil moisture also contributed to the development of the storm; soils in the region were wet following Tropical Storm Barry,\u00a0an on-the-ground condition that can\u00a0enhance storm precipitation totals.\u00a0Vizy and Cook found that soil moisture not only acted as a source of moisture for storm development, it also influenced the circulation and\u00a0the\u00a0low-level jet strength,\u00a0which affected the storm rainfall totals.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For the first few weeks of the semester, the students in GEO 347G worked to\u00a0model the storm exactly as it occurred, working to\u00a0simulate how, when and where the rain fell in this storm,\u00a0as compared with\u00a0satellite\u00a0observations, radar data and ground conditions. This initial step is not a simple one. For instance, a small spinning\u00a0circulation in the thunderstorm, known as a\u00a0mesoscale convective vortex,\u00a0formed within the larger storm. For this weather event to have been properly simulated in the models, that\u00a0vortex\u00a0needed to\u00a0develop over the Hill Country at the correct time.\u00a0<\/p>\n The class then made a series of changes to\u00a0the models\u2019 surface conditions, changing\u00a0sea surface temperatures and soil moisture\u00a0to their average values\u00a0to see how the storm would change.\u00a0These perturbation\u00a0simulations, as they\u2019re called, were run on the\u00a0high-performance\u00a0supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which completed them in a matter of hours. This access to TACC is what made it possible for the class to present on their findings in the span of one semester, Vizy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n And to have 12 students be able to complete all these runs really added to the robustness of the final study.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was certainly a huge help to have the students help with these runs. You can only imagine how much time it takes to prepare, set up, and get a run going,\u201d Vizy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n After the paper was published, Chapa said she felt proud to have contributed to the findings. This class was a special experience, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c(This storm) directly affected everyone in this class,\u201d Chapa said. \u201cThe scientific question was so specific to us and to Texans, so I think that makes it even more special that we got to contribute to this specific paper on this specific topic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For more information, contact:\u00a0Anton Caputo<\/a>, Jackson School of Geosciences, 210-602-2085;\u00a0Monica Kortsha<\/a>, Jackson School of Geosciences, 512-471-2241; or Julia Sames<\/a>, 210-415-9556.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"June 24, 2026 Elizabeth Chapa presents her final project to the GEO 347G class in December 2025. Her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-349091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/July-4-models-840x430.jpg\")
Three maps showing rainfall totals in the Texas Hill Country on July 4, 2025 based on different data inputs. The map on the left shows rainfall totals as recorded by rain gauges. The map in the middle is a model of the rainfall based on observed sea surface temperatures. The map on the right is a model of what rainfall totals could have looked like had sea surface temperatures been at their 40-year average for this time of year. Researchers note that although there are differences between the left and middle rainfall maps, these differences are considered minor and similar to the differences one would see between two different rain gauge datasets or differences among the various models run by the Weather Service. Credit: Edward Vizy<\/p>\n