STORMY WEATHER COULD RAIN ON GRADUATIONS
This weekend’s University of Texas graduation ceremonies should go on without interruption from the weather. Probably. Maybe? University officials say the outdoor commencement ceremony, scheduled for Saturday evening, is going forward as originally planned, at least for the moment. But those officials say plans could change later this week based on forecasts, which now call for storms early Wednesday, scattered rainstorms Thursday and Friday, and yet another round of storms Saturday and Sunday.
“The rain won’t really interrupt it as much as lightning might,” said Troy Kimmel, a University of Texas meteorologist. “We haven’t nailed down the timing of the storms, but lightning on Saturday is what we’re worried about.”
On Saturday night, there is a 50 percent chance of rain, according to National Weather Service forecasts on Tuesday. That means rain is probably going to be falling in Austin, with a roughly 50
percent chance it will fall on UT during the evening and night. Lightning, if spotted around the time of the ceremony and within an 8-mile radius, would prompt the university’s public safety staff to direct people inside immediately.
University spokesman J.B. Bird noted that moving inside for safety purposes shouldn’t be conflated with moving the ceremony indoors and didn’t speculate about whether such a step, if necessary, would mean cancellation, rescheduling or something else. He said people planning to attend the commencement can sign up for free text updates on weather issues, traffic, parking and general information.
The graduation weekend also includes numerous convocations Friday night, during which individual departments recognize candidates individually. Those are indoors, however, and unlikely to be affected by any storms that roll in Friday.
In 2015, storms caused UT to cancel the commencement ceremony just three hours before it was scheduled to start. The university announced that lightning earlier in the day had kept the ceremony’s production staff from completing preparations, with the threat of storms and lightning ultimately leading to the additional cancellation of a 10 p.m. fireworks display.
Instead of rescheduling the commencement ceremony, a small group of students, faculty and staff gathered in a room at the UT Tower to hear the scheduled speech of Darren Walker, a UT graduate and president of the Ford Foundation. The event wasn’t open to the public but was livestreamed via webcast. It was the first time in recent memory the cere- mony had to be postponed or canceled.
Don’t expect the storms coming Saturday to be nearly as gnarly as the ones that derailed the 2015 commencement. Those storms were the result of a particularly intense meteorological churn that produced nearly 1½ inches of rain in a relatively short time span. Two days later, on Memorial Day, 5 inches fell on Austin and caused widespread flooding around the region.