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Weather experts: Lack of planning caused cold catastrophe in US

20 Feb 2021, 12:41 PM IST

1/5

Saw it coming

This week's killer freeze in the U.S. was no surprise.
Government and private meteorologists saw it coming, some nearly three weeks in advance. They started sounding warnings two weeks ahead of time. They talked to officials. They issued blunt warnings through social media.

New York Times

2/5

20 dead

And yet catastrophe happened. At least 20 people have died and 4 million homes at some point lost power, heat or water.
Experts said meteorologists had both types of sciences down right: the math-oriented atmospheric physics for the forecast and the squishy social sciences on how to get their message across.

New York Times

3/5

Unprepared

The event shows how unprepared the nation and its infrastructure are for extreme weather events that will become bigger problems with climate change, meteorologists and disaster experts said.

Reuters

4/5

Ignoring warnings

People heard the message and got the warnings, she said. For various reasons _ thinking cold is no big deal, not having experienced this type of extreme cold, and focusing more on snow and ice than the temperature _ they were unprepared, Klockow-McClain said.
``The meteorology was by far the easiest part of this,'' Klockow-McClain said.

5/5

Early warning

At the University of Oklahoma, meteorology professor Kevin Kloesel, who also is the school's emergency manager, sent out an alert on Jan. 31 warning of ``sub-freezing temperatures and the possibility of sub-zero wind chills.'' By Feb. 7, almost a week before the worst of the freeze started, he was sending multiple warnings a day.