Climate Resilience in Engineering Practice: ASCE-NOAA Task Force

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) joined into a formal agreement to accelerate the development of climate-smart engineering codes and standards.

This cooperation between ASCE, the world’s largest civil engineering professional society, and NOAA, the nation’s largest provider of climate information, seeks to help the nation account for extreme events in future infrastructure design and construction. The ASCE-NOAA Task Force on Climate Resilience in Engineering Practice (ASCE-NOAA Task Force) develops and coordinates activities as part of this engagement.

Read the ASCE-NOAA Summer Workshop 2024 Report

ASCE-NOAA Summer 2025 Workshop

This session summarized the key points during the ASCE-NOAA Summer Workshop 2025.

All of the recordings of the workshop are available at the ASCE-NOAA Workshop 2025 playlist.

Ongoing ASCE-NOAA Collaboration

ASCE-NOAA Task Force

This coordination body holds a meeting every other month to include relevant briefings from various Federal programs, key ASCE committees, and third parties that can provide information and resources to support the effort to improve climate resilience through climate informed civil engineering practice. While the participation in the ASCE-NOAA Task Force is by invitation, people can sign up for the bimonthly newsletter. The newsletter not only summarizes upcoming and past presentations but also has articles and news links for practicing engineers and other resilience practitioners. Further people can view recorded presentations at the ASCE-NOAA Taskforce YouTube Channel.

NOAA’s Industry Proving Ground

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Industry Proving Grounds (IPG) connects major U.S. industries with NOAA products, services, and actionable extreme weather and climate data to better assess risks and opportunities. The IPG initiative focuses on three major sectors: architecture and engineering, reinsurance and insurance, and retail. The IPG program is accelerating climate-smart infrastructure standards that increase resilience nationwide. Working with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA), IPG provides data to help industry leaders account for climate factors in infrastructure design and construction, ensuring safety and productivity in harmony with environmental goals. This collaboration focuses on developing climate information products that offer foresight into future environmental conditions for resilient structures.

The ASCE-NOAA Task Force released the ASCE-NOAA 2022 Workshop Report, which summarizes the discussions between civil engineers and climate scientists on how to best integrate nonstationarity with extreme temperature, intense rainfall, straight-line wind, and coastal hazards into civil engineering planning. The Task Force plans to develop additional documents based on the ongoing discussions and interactions among ASCE, NOAA, and as appropriate other agencies to meet the ASCE-NOAA Memorandum of Understanding commitments.

The ASCE-NOAA Summer Workshop 2024 brought together leaders from engineering, climate science, policy, and infrastructure to explore collaborative strategies for advancing resilient, sustainable development. Grounded in the shared goal of harmonizing built and natural environments, participants focused on aligning hazard data with infrastructure standards, expanding outreach to decision-makers, and identifying emerging priorities in climate resilience.

ASCE highlighted its evolving Codes & Standards and Manuals of Practice, including the newly endorsed ASCE 24-24 standard for designing infrastructure with a 75–100 year horizon. A key theme was the desire to integrate NOAA's localized data into engineering practices and planning tools. Participants discussed implementing a user cycle modeled on NOAA’s Industry Proving Grounds to improve feedback loops between data providers and end users.

Advocacy remained a major point of discussion, with ASCE and partner organizations underscoring the importance of defending federal science funding and engaging with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget. The workshop also stressed the economic and social value of resilient infrastructure, with several speakers emphasizing return on investment, resilience dividends, and the need for new financing models and public-private partnerships.

Speakers addressed the importance of training the next generation of engineers, integrating AI ethically into the profession, and improving accessibility of engineering content. There was broad agreement on the urgency of translating historic climate data into forward-looking models and tools that support decision-making.

Finally, the group acknowledged the critical role of cross-sector partnerships in addressing compound hazards, refining modeling techniques, and simplifying complex data for use by engineers, builders, and policymakers. Participants emphasized continuing to build a coalition of standard-setting bodies, advocates, and practitioners to push for actionable, equitable, and future-ready resilience efforts.
As the working body responsible for executing the actions identified in the cooperative agreement, the Task Force should serve as both an information exchange and as an organizing committee. The main functions of the task force include:
- Promoting an understanding of the needs of the the civil engineering community, especially with regard to weather and climate information in support of the establishment and application of codes and standards
- Providing clear identification and description of specific capabilities within NOAA or NIST that may be relevant to the establishment of ASCE codes and standards that take into account a changing climate
- Promoting an unified approach by communicating these needs and capabilities across the broad landscape of NOAA and NIST programs
- Promoting unified approaches across ASCE to understanding future changes in weather and climate extremes as appropriate
- Identifying milestones for the project and communicating progress and accomplishments.
The ASCE-NOAA Task Force on Climate Resilience in Engineering Practice (ASCE-NOAA Task Force) was established in 2021 to facilitate the climate adaptation of engineering practices and infrastructure.

The vast majority of building codes in the United States and abroad rely on consensus guidance provided by ASCE. With climate change continuing to worsen, ASCE and NOAA have established a partnership to help the nation account for climate change in future infrastructure design and construction to accelerate the development of climate-smart engineering codes and standards. The University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Technology and Systems Management (CTSM) guided the initial stages of this partnership.

The links below provide foundational information about the group.

ASCE Webinar Series

Related PDH Opportunities

Part 1

Leveraging Earth System Science and Modeling to inform Civil Engineering Design Part I: Extreme Temperature and Intense Rainfall

Part 2

Leveraging Earth System Science and Modeling to inform Civil Engineering Design Part 2: Coastal Flood Hazards and Straight-line Winds

Part 3

The Emerging Partnership Between ASCE and NOAA and its Implications for Addressing Nonstationarity in Weather and Climate Extreme in Civil Engineering Practice

ASCE Standards 7 and 24

A focus of this partnership is on prioritizing and producing data. ASCE Standards go through the most thorough vetting process of any ASCE publications and we strive to make them as useful and long-lasting for civil engineers, and those in similar professions, as possible.