by The Trump administration has worked on a new database that enable the Americans precise estimates for the probability of extreme precipitation events in a warming world -a warning about their new flash flood risk.
This database would take into account the influence of climate change for the first time if precipitation frequency estimates are made. It would help people understand their risk and to pave the way for considerable cost savings in designing and building infrastructure projects instead of planning on the basis of data decades ago, as is currently being done.
The break, which was first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by CNN, was struck as fall floods from historical bottlenecks from New Mexico to New York City. More than 130 people in Texas are confirmed dead in Texas on July 4, with around 100 people being missing.
Global warming increases the frequency and severity of extreme precipitation events, but civil engineers, contractors, insurers and everyday real estate owners are currently relying on an outdated database that is known as Atlas 14 and shows the estimates of precipitation frequency. This forces the builders of streets, bridges and other infrastructures to design their projects with the assumption that the worst precipitation events occur less frequently than actually.
In short, builders build the infrastructure for a climate that no longer exists, and homeowners buy new houses without understanding their fourth risk of costly and fatal floods.
The second, more future-oriented phase of the Atlas 15 project is, according to an official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was not entitled to talk about the matter, but it is possible that the period of the overall project of 2026 could still be met if the financing is assigned. The financing of the first phase of the project was provided during the bidges.
The first volume that contains updated estimates of precipitation failures but is exuberant is released by the end of 2025, and the work lasts, said the official.
Finally, the two phases are intended to create a national, interactive database with precipitation frequency estimates, including future projections, such as the statistical probability of a 100-year precipitation event in a specific location. (A 100th anniversary of the precipitation is one of such an intense that on average it will only occur every 100 years. Some people refer to these events and their effects as “flooding of the century”.)
The use of outdated precipitation frequency estimates can have expensive consequences if the infrastructure is destroyed by a flood that rarely occurred, but now in a warmer world it is far more likely.
A white Audi was stuck when the Central Avenue flooded on Saturday, June 7, 2025, in Albany, New York. – Jim Franco/Albany Times Union/Getty Images/File
According to NWS spokesman Erica Grow CEI, the first volume is to be published by the end of the year and will even be a “great progress” by today’s meteorologists and engineers who are outdated and inconsistent across the country.
“This will be a consistent baseline for everyone,” she told CNN.
As for the second volume that would contain the air -conditioned rainfall, she said: “Volume 2 is checked.”
“After the Trump administration, NOAA is obliged to produce gold standard research products that provide the best and most precise data to serve the national interest, to protect public security and to offer our taxpayers the greatest value,” said NOAA spokesman Kim Doster in a statement.
Atlas 15 should move the NOAA and those who are dependent on the agency from the assumption that the climate is inpatient, up to a realization that the extremes of the rainfall in the process of burning fossil fuels for energy and transport width change. A pilot phase of Atlas 15, which contains estimates of today’s risk of precipitation exclusively for the state of Montana, was published last year. It also shows how the precipitation rates for 100 years of events can increase with continued global warming.
It contains forecasts for precipitation frequency estimates at 3 degrees Celsius global warming and 1.5 degrees heating. The world has already heated up around 1.2 degrees.
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Dan Walker, who has the American Society of Civil Engineers-Noaa-Task Force for climate-like in the engineering practice, said that he was aware of the second part of Atlas 15 that he had reached some turbulence, probably due to the call for climate change.
“In my view, it is not nearly as expensive and labor -intensive to make volume two like volume 1,” said Walker. “I think volume 1 is the heavy buoyancy. Volume two is more an ideological buoyancy.”
“This is not about frightening people, they know, changes in the climate,” he said.
“This is about engineers, companies and public work that enable the best possible decisions so that we are not in a situation in which we build something today, and in 20 years we have to go back and retrofit, or we have how to have problems with rainwater control, or we have flood problems because we are signed.”
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