Tropical Depression Chantal was bringing flooding rains and multiple tornadoes to central North Carolina over Sunday night, prompting Orange and Moore counties to declare states of emergencies.
The big picture: Chantal was threatening communities inland after making landfall as a tropical storm along the coast of the Carolinas on Sunday morning, with the National Weather Service noting that thunderstorms associated with the depression were producing "very heavy rainfall" across central and eastern N.C. and into southern Virginia.
The Trump administration pushed back Sunday on criticism of the National Weather Service's initial forecasting and its staffing levels ahead of Central Texas' catastrophic flooding.
The big picture: The storm that's killed at least 80 people has brought renewed scrutiny to federal cuts at NOAA's NWS after it emerged that two Texas NWS offices were missing key staff at the time — including San Antonio, where a veteran warning coordination meteorologist has taken an early retirement buyout in April.
While the story of the Texas flooding tragedy and what went wrong is still unspooling, scientists said it provides another reminder that climate change can make extreme rainfall events even worse.
What they're saying: "[T]his kind of record-shattering rain (caused by slow-moving torrential thunderstorms) event is *precisely* that which is increasing the fastest in warming climate," UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a longer social media thread.
