With stunning accuracy, Rice researchers predicted the peak surge of Houston's Brays Bayou during and immediately after Ike, despite power outages that shut down the university's computing center at a critical time.

"The TMC was very happy about how well the system worked and the fact that we were able to pull this off via a long-distance connection," said Phil Bedient, Rice's Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and a widely known expert on flood warning and storm surges. "They were very concerned, because if the medical center had gone under, it would have been a mess."

Bedient, who with the TMC set up a real-time flood alert system in the years since Allison, saw that effort pay off during the storm. "We absolutely nailed it," he said. Having lost power at his own Houston home, Bedient spent a long night during Ike evaluating radar rainfall data coming by phone from the National Weather Service's radar through Vieux & Associates Inc. in Oklahoma and calling medical center officials with his predictions.