The groundbreaking federal infrastructure bill has revealed a nationwide gap in the data used to guide urban development; as states and cities are looking to improve the stormwater drainage system, questions arise on how much annual rainfall rates are expected to change in the next 100 years. In the past, cities turned to historical data collected and stored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Many times, the data is piecemeal and updated every few decades, this is problematic since it does not account for the change in weather patterns due to global warming. The explanation offered is that states have to request updates and pay for the reports and few have sought the need to do so since this issue is not visible unless a rare major flooding event occurs. Additionally, the NOAA Atlas 14 reports do not provide projections of future rainfall rates, forcing officials to blindly depend on outdated information to upgrade the infrastructure. A handful of large cities have partnered with universities to overcome this challenge, and have found that they have significantly underestimated the volume of rainfall that is likely to occur, forcing them to revise the investments and increase spending to ensure that the drainage system lasts 100 years and does not become obsolete before its due. Strategies to reduce costs involve updating and analyzing the whole countries data all at once rather than in a piecemeal fashion, using projections rather than historical data, and updating the infrastructure using this new information.
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