Extreme weather expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on The Texas Flash Floods: ‘A tragedy that should never happen again’ – ‘Occurred in a location that has among the greatest risks in the nation of flash flooding’
By Roger Pielke Jr.: Hoyt and Langbein 1940 identified south central Texas as being among the regions of the United States with the greatest risk of flooding.
The flooding was certainly extreme but it should not have been historically unexpected. The documented record of extreme flooding in “flash flood alley” goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past.
Consider the figure above, from a classic 1940 historical text on U.S. floods, which shows that the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bullseye for flash flooding. In fact, almost a century before Hoyt and Langbein, Texas experienced one of the greatest losses of life in U.S. history related to extreme weather. ...
The data show considerable variation across the U.S. but also no indication of an increase in this metric for “flash flood alley” over this 42-year analysis. ... The IPCC AR6 WG1 concluded the following on U.S. river floods:
There is limited evidence and low agreement on observed climate change influences for river floods in North America (Section 11.5). Trends in streamflow indices are mixed and difficult to separate from river engineering influences, with large changes but little spatial coherence across the USA, making it difficult to identify trends with confidence . . .
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/07/06/extreme-weather-expert-dr-roger-pielke-jr-on-the-texas-flash-floods-a-tragedy-that-should-never-happen-again-occurred-in-a-location-that-has-among-the-greatest-risks-in-the-nation-of-flash/
