Eight people died in Texas tornadoes with little warning. Could the NWS have done more?

The twister stretched one-third of a mile wide as it bore down on the small town of Matador, Texas.

As it tore through the west side of the town, about 80 miles northeast of Lubbock, it carried wind speeds up to 165 mph and dropped “extremely large hail” chunks, some the size of DVDs. The tornado’s path was over nine miles long, and, in all, it lasted for about 18 minutes.

By the time the tornado dissipated, it had killed four people and injured 15 more, according to the National Weather Service.

NWS data shows that the agency issued a tornado warning — the most crucial and dire of the tornado-related alerts — at 7:56 p.m. on June 21. That was six minutes before the tornado began its tear through Matador.

The tornado was the third deadly twister in less than two months that hit Texas with little notice. Across the severe storms in Matador, in Perryton (near the border with Oklahoma in the Texas panhandle) and in Laguna Heights (at the southern tip of Texas), eight people died. In all three cases, the time between the tornado warning and the tornado impact was far less than the NWS goal of 13 minutes. And in two of the three cases, the NWS radars were not set to scan as frequently as they could have, leaving as much as five minutes between scans.

Rob White, president of Texas-based private forecasting service WeatherGuidance, said tornado warnings that are issued minutes before impact automatically make him wonder, “What’s being done wrong?”

“It’s not like the technology has retrogressed,” White said. “There’s not really a firm, consistent reason why we should be seeing that happen from the science and the technology standpoint.”

But at the same time, the NWS offices themselves have not identified mistakes or oversights in their storm responses.

“You can always go back and scrutinize and see things,” said Mike Gittinger, the meteorologist-in-charge at the NWS Amarillo office. “It’s a subjective call, in a way.”

Over the last decade, Texas has seen an average of about 120 tornadoes per year, with the largest number coming in the month of May. A dataset built by the El Paso Times shows that, from 2016 to 2022, there were between zero and four tornado fatalities in Texas each year. The year before that, in 2015, there was a string of deadly tornadoes that killed a total of 17 people.

In the most recent set of stats, from October to April, the NWS averaged about 11.5 minutes’ lead time nationwide for weaker tornadoes and about 20 minutes’ lead time for stronger tornadoes, according to Aaron Treadway, the NWS Severe Program Coordinator.

For residents, a matter of minutes can “absolutely” be the difference between life and death, said Mike Smith, a meteorologist and retired AccuWeather executive based in Kansas.

“You need every second you can get,” he said.

But, because every storm is different, it can be tricky to decide exactly when to issue a tornado warning, Treadway said. Forecasters are working to interpret radars and incorporate reports from storm chasers or other eyewitnesses, while also balancing the need to be accurate and not issue needless warnings.

“We’re wanting to provide as much lead time and as much notice to the public, so that they can take shelter and take their protective actions, but each situation is unique,” Treadway said. “It is not a one-size-fits-all when it comes to warning.”

In some cases, though, it simply isn’t possible to give 13 minutes’ notice. So what happened in these three twisters?

Matador

The Matador tornado, which touched down on June 21, is still being reviewed by the local office, according to NWS Lubbock’s science and operations officer, Mark Conder. That means that Conder couldn’t yet say whether the warning should’ve been called earlier in that case.

He noted, though, that the office had been taking other steps to prep the public for potentially severe storms.

In Matador, a tornado watch was issued 54 minutes before the tornado touched down, and the NWS local office had been in touch with the local sheriff’s office to give updates about the weather, Conder said.

But the NWS tornado warnings signal most clearly to the public that danger is imminent.

“The lead time from when the warning was issued to where the tornado hit Matador was only five or six minutes,” he said. “That’s definitely less lead time than we would like, of course, and lower lead time than the average that the weather service provides for tornadoes.”

With the caveat that the situation and the NWS reaction to it is still under review, Conder said it’s not clear that the radar itself gave much notice before the tornado formed. There was indication of a rotating storm on the radar, Conder said, but that doesn’t actually mean that a tornado will form.

“Not every storm (that) rotates is going to produce a tornado. In fact, only about 30%, less than a third of them, do that,” Conder said.

Because storms can change so quickly, the NWS aims to switch its radars into a mode called SAILS when the weather is showing tornado potential, according to Treadway, the NWS severe program coordinator. This mode produces scans every two minutes or less and gives more frequent updates on the storm’s development.

“We strive to have that SAILS feature on when there is a threat for tornadoes so that we’re getting really as frequently as possible these radar updates,” Treadway said. “Especially for the weaker tornadoes, it could just be one scan that we may get of the tornado and then it may be gone.”

Conder said that, in the case of the Matador tornado, the radar was switched into SAILS mode, although at a slightly less frequent scan rate, that produced a new scan about every three minutes.

In addition to radar images, Smith, the Kansas-based meteorologist, also flagged another early indicator that a tornado had formed near Matador. At 7:49 p.m. on June 21 – seven minutes before NWS called a tornado warning and 13 minutes before the tornado touched down — a meteorologist posted in an NWS message thread that a tornado had appeared on his livestream.

That message thread was for the Amarillo NWS office, instead of the Lubbock office, but an Amarillo NWS employee responded one minute later and said they’d pass the info along to Lubbock. Conder confirmed that the message was sent in the Amarillo chat at 7:49 p.m. and that it was passed along to the Lubbock office at 7:50 p.m. He said in an email that he wasn’t able to confirm how or if that message was factored in to the forecasters’ warning decision.

At 7:50 p.m. in the Lubbock office chat, which Smith provided to the Star-Telegram, the office noted that the “Tornado threat is rapidly increasing” near Matador. A minute later, the office wrote that the storm’s “Circulation is not quite sufficiently tight to suggest a tornado but it isn’t too far from that.” Five minutes after that, a storm chaser recorded video of a “brief tornado north of Matador” and, in the same minute, NWS issued a tornado warning.

Perryton

A week before the Matador tornado, a town in the Texas panhandle was hit with its own deadly tornado. The Perryton tornado touched down in the early evening on June 15, ripping through a neighborhood of mobile homes, destroying dozens of them. The twister killed three people and injured more than a hundred, according to news reports.

Similarly to the Matador tornado, NWS did issue lesser notices leading up to the eventual tornado warning. More than two and a half hours before the tornado hit, the agency issued a tornado watch. About 37 minutes before the tornado hit, the agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning. And 16 minutes before the tornado hit, the agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning with a tornado possible.

But the actual tornado warning came at 5:06 p.m., according to NWS data, as the twister was already on the ground. Perryton residents were given zero time between the warning and the impact.

Gittinger, the meteorologist-in-charge at NWS Amarillo, said that, while he wishes the warning could’ve been called earlier, the tornado popped up quickly – both from the perspective of the radar and the storm chasers on the ground — leaving forecasters little time to react.

“You always wish, in a situation like this, that you had pulled the trigger earlier,” Gittinger said. “The reason the trigger wasn’t pulled sooner … was that it visually didn’t look like it was close.”

Based on the information they had at the time, Gittinger said, he wasn’t concerned about the way the office reacted.

“It’s just unfortunate that it all came together so quickly, so close to town,” he said.

In an email, Gittinger added that he had reviewed the radar scans again and that “very few trained radar operators would have issued a tornado warning” prior to when it was issued.

Gittinger also said that, at the time the tornado formed and impacted, the radar was not set to SAILS mode. Instead of scanning as frequently as possible, it was in a mode that produced scans about four minutes apart.

Gittinger said in an email that the decision to use SAILS or a different setting would’ve been a “judgment call.” The SAILS setting does scan more frequently at lower altitudes, but it also decreases scans at higher altitudes, reducing detection of things such as hail, Gittinger said.

And, while Gittinger said more frequent scanning may or may not have shown a definitive tornado signature earlier on, he said “these are the types of things we look at and consider for improvement.”

Laguna Heights

A month before the Perryton tornado, across the state in the southernmost county, a smaller tornado struck Laguna Heights. The tornado was the lowest level tornado on the NWS ranking scale, and it was on the ground for just two minutes. But during those two minutes, the twister “flattened” at least six mobile homes, according to the NWS, and killed a resident of one of those homes. Eleven more people were injured.

And, while the NWS did issue a special weather statement for high winds 40 minutes before the twister, in Laguna Heights there was no tornado watch issued.

The tornado warning came at 4:04 a.m., and the tornado hit two minutes later at 4:06 a.m.

At a news conference after the twister, Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. said the twister “popped out of nowhere.”

Barry Goldsmith, the warning coordination meteorologist for NWS Brownsville/Rio Grande Valley, said the tornado turned quickly from undefined to certain.

“This event was not your classic Midwestern or Great Plains supercell,” he said. “These can form up in a matter of minutes.”

Goldsmith said the office was not using SAILS mode at the time of the tornado. The local radar was set to scan every four to five minutes, he said.

Goldsmith also flagged forecasters’ balancing act, as they try to walk the line between giving as much notice as possible and issuing too many false alarms.

“We like to have at least two volume scans in our vision, in our pocket, in our queue, before jumping on the warning message,” he said. “By the time we had that second scan that really made it clear we had a tornado, that’s when the warning decision was made.”

After the three short-notice tornado warnings, Gittinger, in the NWS Amarillo office, encouraged residents to think about their safety plans for severe weather. Particularly for people who live in vulnerable settings — whether that be a mobile home or a tall apartment building — he recommended that residents get to a safe shelter spot even before tornado warnings are issued.

“If you’re in a circumstance where you don’t have a safe place close by … your best decision may be to have already moved before the warning’s out,” Gittinger said. “In some circumstances, the plan may be that, when a watch is issued and there are storms that are relatively close by, you get to safety and don’t wait for a warning, because you may not have a lot of time.”