Weather forecasters in the United States have issued alerts about the ‘catastrophic’ scale of a snowstorm expected to hit Texas imminently, based on recent reports of the junior U.S. senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, hastily departing the state.

“Based on historical pattern analysis, Senator Ted Cruz’s abrupt departures from the state remain the most reliable indicator of the potential severity of an approaching snowstorm,” Texas’ leading weather expert said, according to all major media outlets covering the story.

A spokesperson for Senator Cruz, who reportedly trampled over his wife and children as he fled Texas in a state of alarm, maintained that the senator had merely been running late for a critical official meeting in Cancún and insisted that all previous patterns were purely coincidental.