"The fallout from Hurricane Harvey is still ongoing here," says Craig Raborn, director of transportation of the Houston-Galveston Area Council. Without updated rainfall records, cities risk building infrastructure that can't withstand intensifying storms.ĭespite the added cost, experiencing a record-breaking disaster seemed to change the conversation in the community. Rainfall from the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded homes in New Jersey. "We did anticipate it increasing somewhat, just not quite that much." "It may have been a case of 'be careful what you wish for,'" says Craig Maske, chief planning officer at the Harris County Flood Control District. Instead of 13 inches of rain, it now dropped almost 17 inches of rain in Harris County. The NOAA analysis found that a major storm, known as the 1-in-100-year storm, had become almost 30% wetter. The results confirmed what they suspected: Rainstorms have already gotten more intense. Army Corps of Engineers, raised $1.75 million for a statewide study in 2016.
A group of local flood agencies in Texas, along with the regional office of the U.S. The agency itself has historically not had the budget to conduct the studies. But to get new precipitation data that captures how storms have already changed in recent years, local or state agencies need to pay the federal government for it under NOAA's policy. Intersections and roadways were getting swamped with water in heavy rain. Regional planners knew urban flooding was on the rise. The destruction left in its wake cost $125 billion with more than 100,000 homes damaged.īut even before the hurricane hit, city planners had begun to realize that storms, much weaker than Harvey, were becoming a greater danger because the infrastructure wasn't designed for them. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in the summer of 2017, the slow-moving storm dropped as much as 60 inches of rain. "If we have over a trillion dollars going out the door in infrastructure, then let's have the very best standards and data so we're designing this stuff right." Infrastructure built for the climate of the past "It's core to probably hundreds or thousands of development decisions everyday," says Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. So many flood planners are also pushing NOAA to fund and release local forecasts of how rainfall is expected to intensify going forward, to ensure that infrastructure projects built today won't become obsolete as temperatures warm. Still, those up-to-date records won't show how the climate will continue to change in the future.
PRECIPITATE RECORDS HOW TO
Now, as NOAA determines how to spend its own infrastructure bill funding, many cities are hoping the agency commits to doing regular, nationwide updates of its precipitation reports, known as Atlas 14, to provide a systematic snapshot of how storms have already intensified. Last summer, for example, 50 people drowned when the remnants of Hurricane Ida overwhelmed urban stormwater drainage systems in the Northeast. Heavier downpours are taking an increasing toll on cities, inundating homes and roads. The disconnect between the kinds of upgrades a changing climate demands and the data available to communities is already imperiling lives. And states themselves have to pay for those updates. Rainfall reports for some states are 50 years old, which means they don't reflect how the climate has already changed in recent decades. Those federal precipitation reports, which analyze historical rainfall data to tell cities what kinds of storms to plan for, are only sporadically updated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many cities are still building their infrastructure for the climate of the past, using rainfall records that haven't been updated in decades. But as cities make plans to tear up streets and pour cement, most have little to no information about how climate change will worsen future storms. Those new sewers and storm drains will need to withstand rainfall that's becoming more intense in a changing climate. In a hotter climate, rainstorms are becoming more intense.Īmerican cities are poised to spend billions of dollars to improve their water systems under the federal infrastructure bill, the largest water investment in the nation's history. If a precipitate forms, write the net ionic equation for the reaction.Heavy rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded roads and expressways in New York in 2021. \) to determine which, if any, of the products is insoluble and will therefore form a precipitate.
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