AI couldn’t forecast Texas floods. Trump’s NOAA cuts won’t help.

By Chelsea Harvey | 07/15/2025 06:59 AM EDT

The administration wants to reduce the agency’s budget by $2.2 billion, eliminating research that might help advance AI weather models.

Visitors walk past crosses at a make-shift memorial honoring flood victims, Sunday, July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas.

Visitors walk past crosses at a make-shift memorial honoring flood victims on Sunday in Kerrville, Texas. Eric Gay/AP

Artificial intelligence is showing promise when it comes to weather forecasting, but it still couldn’t predict the Texas floods.

The best-performing weather models during the July 4 floods were traditional ones specially designed to produce local forecasts at high resolution. Global-scale models were far less accurate — and so were AI models, weather experts say.

“All those new fancy AI models? They missed it too,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources, in a live YouTube talk on July 7.

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Some meteorologists say that could change. AI weather models are starting to exhibit an ability for deep learning of atmospheric physics, which means they could be capable of forecasting unprecedented weather events based on atmospheric conditions.

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