The greater emphasis being placed on critical infrastructure and community resilience in the face of climate change, extreme weather events, and man made threats necessitates new tools to assist in achieving greater resilience through planning.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, NOAA, USACE, and FEMA recently released a sea level rise planning tool, which includes interactive sea level rise maps and calculator.
The tool does not tell communities how to rebuild. But it can help inform decisions on how to balance the cost of rebuilding stronger and safer based on the amount of risk a community can tolerate over the long term by understand possible future flood risks from sea level rise.
Also, last week the EPA released a national stormwater calculator to help site developers, landscape architects, urban planners, and homeowners estimate the annual amount of rainwater and frequency of runoff from a specific site in the United States. The estimates are based on local soil conditions, land cover, and historic rainfall records.
The calculator, which is the first phase of the Stormwater Calculator and Climate Assessment Tool package announced in President Obama's climate action plan in June, is a desktop application that allows users to enter any location and select different scenarios to learn how specific green infrastructure changes can prevent runoff.
Both of these resources are available on the WaterISAC portal under Tools and Applications and from the NOAA and EPA.