NOAA was developing a way to predict extreme rainfall -- until Trump officials stopped it

Source: Washington Post

The Commerce Department has indefinitely suspended work on a crucial tool to help communities predict how rising global temperatures will alter the frequency of extreme rainfall, according to three current and former federal officials familiar with the decision, a move that experts said will make the country more vulnerable to storms supercharged by climate change.

The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks, and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.

The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.

But work on Atlas 15′s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of volume two this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/07/16/noaa-rainfall-predictions-climate-change/