Climate Adaptation Engineering Bulletin 1
Welcome to the first in a new series of Climate Adaptation Engineering Bulletins featuring actionable information on the effects of climate change that engineers can put into practice. Each is prepared by ASCE’s member committee on climate change adaptation, in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
These brief 800-word technical notes, to appear approximately every six weeks on Civil Engineering Source, are intended to be understandable by practicing engineers and upper-level engineering students with limited climate change knowledge to date, yet credible to climate-savvy practicing engineers. They are co-edited by Dan Walker, Ph.D, M.ASCE, and Craig Musselman, P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, and drafted with the assistance of guest authors.
Each article is independently peer reviewed by engineers and climate scientists with the ASCE Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate and, where applicable, articles are reviewed and commented upon by senior scientists in the related area of climate science at NOAA and other federal agencies. These short engineering bulletins are intended to be of the highest technical and scientific quality and to provide links to robust technical resources for access by practicing engineers.
According to Walker, co-chair of the ASCE-NOAA Task Force, “this effort is an off-shoot of the task force and is of critical importance both to ASCE and to NOAA to disseminate understandable and actionable climate science information to practicing engineers at all levels of practice throughout the engineering community in the U.S.”
In keeping with that objective, ASCE will be publishing these Climate Adaptation Engineering Bulletins in the Source and will be providing each to other engineering organizations with encouragement to distribute the information to their members.
The most recent edition of the Sea Level Rise Technical Report, produced by a federal interagency task force, revises projections issued in 2017 using updated observations and models. NOAA, NASA, EPA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and FEMA formed the task force and shared data and other resources to produce the report.
A new technical note by Walker, Musselman, and CACC takes a look at the revised 2022 report’s projected increases in mean higher high water levels, and how the report’s useful online tool offers projections per decade through 2100. Read the complete technical note at https://collaborate.asce.org/blogs/committee-on-adaptation-to-a-changing-climate/2024/09/11/using-federal-sea-level-rise-projections-in-civil. The opening paragraphs are below.
Technical Note 24.1
Using Federal Sea Level Rise Projections in Civil Engineering Practice ![]()
Sea levels have been rising globally since at least the late 1800s, but the rate of rise from 1901-2018 is easily the highest it has been in the last 3000 years. An accelerating trend has been especially noticeable since the 1970s, primarily driven by melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and thermal expansion of ocean water due to near surface increases in water temperature. Of particular interest are the significant differences in sea level rise projections for East, Gulf and West Coast sites. Sea level rise will have a continuing substantial impact on the planning and design of civil engineering projects in coastal areas.
Read the complete technical note, learn how the updated findings can aid your project planning and join in the discussion at ASCE Collaborate: https://collaborate.asce.org/blogs/committee-on-adaptation-to-a-changing-climate/2024/09/11/using-federal-sea-level-rise-projections-in-civil.
