GRAND FORKS - Forecasters are still stung by the spray-painted words, many of them obscene, on what was left of flood-ruined homes after the Red River swamped this city a decade ago.

"49 feet my ass," read one, a jab at the original 49-foot crest prediction - held for weeks - before the weather service predicted the 54-foot crest that forced most of the 60,000 people in Grand Forks and neighboring East Grand Forks, Minn., out of their homes.

"My husband's wasn't that catchy - but you can't print what he wrote on our house," said Colleen Bushy, who lives in neighboring East Grand Forks, Minn.

The National Weather Service has changed its forecasting methods since the 1997 flood disaster - not only for Grand Forks but also for disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

"Our science, modeling and communication are better," said Dan Luna, hydrologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Chanhassen, Minn. "We learned a lot in 1997."

Some of what they learned involves telling people what forecasters don't know.

Forecasters now stress the uncertainties of their predictions in stronger terms, said Edward Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy in Silver Spring, Md.

"The Red River of the North flood is used as a case study on estimating and communicating forecast uncertainty," he said. "The flooding in 1997 provided strong motivation for improvements."

The weather service now gives a range of worst-case possibilities.

Johnson said forecasting today, whether for floods or hurricanes, "represents multiple possible future outcomes." He called it "hedging."

One of the biggest problems of the 1997 Red River flood was a communication breakdown, Luna said. Forecasters want to make sure that does not happen again.

"We actually make phone calls to emergency managers now," Luna said. "We've got to do whatever we can to make sure everybody gets the word."

During Hurricane Katrina, top weather service officials personally called governors and other officials to explain the forecast "and to let them know this is a really big deal," he said.

"If there were phone calls in 1997, there weren't many," Luna said. "That has changed."

Bob Bushy, of East Grand Forks, said the message he wrote on his home with a salvaged can of spray paint was done partly out of anger with the forecast.

"Mine was a little dirty," Bob Bushy said of his slogan.

His anger peaked, he said, when he found his prized beer mirror collection had been destroyed by the flood.