IN FOCUS: Preparing for the East Texas storm season
TYLER, Texas (KETK) – In this edition of East Texas In Focus, KETK's Nolan Hoffman spoke with KETK Chief Meteorologist Carson Vickroy about helping East Texas prepare for severe weather which is most common in the spring months, particularly from April till June.
IN FOCUS: Fixing East Texas' weather radar 'dead zone'
Nolan and Carson covered several topics in their discussion including this season's potential for severe weather, the radar dead zone in East Texas and even artificial intelligence.
Much of East Texas sits in the middle of a coverage dead zone for radar stations, the closest of which are in Fort Worth and Shreveport. This dead zone means it's even more important for KETK to have storm watchers in the community looking out for weather close to the ground like tornadoes.
'So when we are forecasting the weather, when we are tracking the severe weather here in East Texas, we typically use two radars, the one that's closest to us is Shreveport, which is about 80 miles away from Tyler,' Carson said. 'And the radar beams, Nolan, they shoot up into the atmosphere. So what we are seeing is not at the ground level, but what we are seeing is about a mile up into the atmosphere, and we're not seeing the low level features like tornadoes, the hail size, which is why it's important that we have storm spotters on the ground to report anything that's going on at surface level and Fort Worth doesn't get much better either.'
Continuing their discussion of meteorology tech, Carson and Nolan discussed the potential introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into weather models.
'What we are seeing a lot of now is AI's introduction to weather forecasting. So there are some forecast models out there that are scary good, some of the time,' Carson said. 'And then some other times, there's still some work that the scientists have to do.'
Residents in Henderson preparing for storm season
Their discussion then moved onto forecasting severe weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes like East Texas saw last year with Hurricane Beryl.
'So when Beryl was coming through, we had tons of tornado warnings because we were in the messy side of the storm,' Carson said. 'The storm made landfall on the central Texas Gulf Coast. And that's what we're looking out for in the summertime, because any time we're on the east side of a landfalling hurricane or tropical storm, you tend to see issues with one flash flooding to the wind.'
To learn even more about this storm season and weather forecasting, watch the full episode of East Texas In Focus at the top of this article.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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