World Central Kitchen via Flickr If you thought you rode some serious roller coasters during your summer vacation, Atlas 15 would love to compare notes.
The in-the-works successor to Atlas 14 is intended to provide the most accurate information possible about rainfall and flash flood risk, emphasizing statistical analysis. Like its predecessor, Volume 1 of Atlas 15, commissioned in 2022 and being developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will not include any projections related to the increasing intensity and frequency of storms.
Further reading:
- States weigh changes to civil engineers’ licenses; advocates hold firm
- Landmark climate-assessment report highlights ASCE data collaboration
- How civil engineers must adapt to the new risks of flooding
Volume 2, however, will account for climate change, which is where the current administration saw a red flag and stepped in to halt this phase on July 10. But just when it looked like it was time to remove seat belts and exit the roller coaster midride, the process was allowed to continue barely a week later.
Dan Walker, Ph.D., P.G., M.ASCE, says it is critical for Atlas 15 to proceed uninterrupted.
“This is an incredibly important dataset for civil engineers,” said Walker, a senior geologist with EA Engineering, Science, and Technology Inc. and a co-chair of the ASCE-NOAA Task Force, which was formed to accelerate the development of climate-smart engineering codes and standards. “It impacts everything, from roof design to stormwater design to defining floodplains. It’s a very essential dataset.”
The funding was paused just days after the early July Texas floods that claimed at least 135 lives, including dozens of children. The freeze in funding, juxtaposed with the Texas tragedy and subsequent flooding in the New York-New Jersey area, brought public pushback, with many seeing Atlas 15 as a possible way to save lives when future flood events occur.
Funding was restored within days.
‘A very relevant product’
Walker, who is also with the Center for Technology and Systems Management within the University of Maryland’s department of civil and environmental engineering, says his initial reaction to the reversal was: “Let’s just take the win as a sign that someone is listening.”
And he sees it as a big victory that will improve public safety and reduce property losses.
“Atlas 15 not only is a very relevant product for engineering design, but it really kind of represents that transition from, ‘We’re doing everything based on historical observations’ to now trying to incorporate an understanding of what will happen going forward in a very rigorous, peer-reviewed, publicly available dataset,” Walker said.
"This is an incredibly important dataset for civil engineers."
- Dan Walker, geologist“One of the ways to reduce the impacts of climate change is to adapt to that change,” he added. “If we want to reduce the losses to the built environment due to hazard-related disasters, you’ve got to design for these changes.”
Unfortunately, as Darren Olson, chair of the committee that produced the 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, said upon release of that document, the efforts of civil engineers most often are widely discussed publicly only when there is a tragedy such as a bridge failure or dam break. Olson champions the report card as a way to put infrastructure and other civil engineering efforts in the spotlight without anybody getting hurt or dying.
While the report card did that – and continues to do so – the flash flooding in Texas was the latest tragedy to grab headlines and call attention to how civil engineers’ efforts lead to improved public safety.
“There’s a long history of public policy changing in reaction to major tragedies,” Walker said. “You’d have to be somewhat naive to believe that (wide-scale recent flooding across the U.S.) didn’t contribute to an atmosphere where there was more of an openness to (reconsidering): ‘Is this the time for us to be shutting down well-thought-of, well-regarded, and anticipated efforts to characterize risk from intense rainfall?’”
Similarly, the ASCE-NOAA Task Force was created to ensure that ASCE has the data and expertise needed to update the Society’s standards and manuals of practice to account for changes in the frequency and strength of storms, says Walker, whose co-chairs on the task force are Bilal Ayyub, Ph.D., P.E., F.SEI, Dist.M.ASCE, and Amanda McCarty, director of NOAA’s Climate-Ready Nation.
Planning for the future
Walker explained that much of the planned and designed infrastructure in the U.S. has a functional life of 50-100 years. So if engineers only consider today’s climate in their designs, they are opening themselves up to future problems.
“We’re still very much focused on working with NOAA to co-develop products and services civil engineers need and then helping civil engineers understand the availability of different kinds of datasets and their limitations,” he said. “That’s the other big part of it: If you really drill down and you look at details in a lot of the work that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does or that NOAA does, there’s limitations in terms of, ‘What do we understand about the evolving wind patterns?’ or ‘What do we understand or don’t we understand about issues like variability in snowfall or sea-level rise?’
“You have to go beyond the numbers to really get down to that level of expertise, and we find that expertise in NOAA.”
Atlas 15 can also provide vital information to civil engineers who are working to design safe infrastructure. The data focuses on intensity, duration, and frequency of rainfall. It looks at each region of the country to determine historical and expected future patterns.
Regions can have similar amounts of annual rainfall while experiencing it much differently; flash flooding is a much different phenomenon to consider than steady rainfall over the course of a year that doesn’t include flash flooding.
Atlas 15’s second volume also considers what Walker calls the physics of rainfall and how rising temperatures can increase water vapor content in the atmosphere. More intense, shorter-duration storms lead to rapid runoff.
“It gives us a sense of, ‘How do we expect rainfall patterns to change going forward?’” Walker said. “It’s something that ASCE has been pushing for, for at least 10 years.”
One concern for many when considering designing for more frequent and intense storms is the cost.
But Walker says it’s not necessarily always more expensive to adjust designs based on climate change, especially when using statistical analyses. These datasets reduce guesswork for engineers and ensure that their designs are safe while not overcorrecting.
“Taking the approach that we’re taking with respect to climate and climate resilience, it’s not a given that in all instances changes in design are going to be significantly more expensive,” he said. “You could very well be overdesigning in some areas where if you really did a detailed statistical analysis that accounts for changes in future climate, either there’s not much expected change or the change might even be the other direction.”
Also of note
- The U.S. Department of Transportation issued updated guidance meant to increase the flexibility and efficiency of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program. The program provides $5 billion over five years to states to deploy EV charging infrastructure.
- In a letter to House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves, R-Mo., and ranking member Rick Larson, D-Wash., ASCE endorsed the FEMA Act of 2025, which would reestablish the Federal Emergency Management Agency as an independent, Cabinet-level agency and align FEMA’s authority with the Stafford Act.
- The Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding its 2009 “endangerment finding.” The 2009 finding determined that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health and safety and set a legal basis to regulate GHGs as air pollution under the Clean Air Act.
