1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

The Trump administration halted a crucial NOAA program that was nearly complete, one designed to help communities prepare for the growing threat of extreme rainfall and flooding. The project, known as Atlas 15 Volume 2, was meant to forecast how rainfall patterns would change in the future due to climate change. It would have provided local governments, engineers, and planners with a nationally standardized dataset showing how intense storms are expected to evolve. But this spring, the Commerce Department, now led by Secretary Howard Lutnick, indefinitely suspended the project following a review ordered by the administration. This matters because the rainfall data currently in use is dangerously outdated. Most of the country still relies on figures from decades ago, some going back to the 1970s or earlier. While some regions have received slightly more recent updates through NOAA’s Atlas 14 (released in phases between 2004 and 2023), those products still only reflect past weather. None of them account for how rainfall is shifting in real time due to global warming. The now-canceled Atlas 15 Volume 2 was going to change that by offering forward-looking, climate-adjusted predictions. Without it, cities are left guessing. Meanwhile, floods are becoming more frequent and deadly. What used to be considered a “once-in-100-years” storm now hits some areas every 25 years, or even more often. But critical infrastructure like stormwater systems, roads, and bridges is still being built based on outdated assumptions about rainfall. That gap between reality and planning leads to dangerous and costly failures. The NOAA tool was not an expensive endeavor, and it was close to completion. Still, the Trump administration shut it down part of a broader effort to scale back or dismantle federal climate science programs. Please restart it, we need this to save lives.