Greetings from my hotel room in Asheville, NC, following the kickoff of NOAA’s Industry Proving Ground program and during a time when the weather has been incredibly unstable with the polar air slipping into the lower part of the lower 48. It was a great day to talk climate, data, and engineering!
This new program promotes the development and use of actionable climate data. Sitting with two of my ASCE colleagues, Don Scott of SEI and Chair of the ASCE 7-28 committee, and Dr. Norma Jean Mattei, president of COPRI, we talked with the Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves and Dr. Rick Spinrad, the Administrator of NOAA. We were joined by the Retail Industry Leaders Association and the Reinsurance Association of America. We discussed the priority needs for climate data to support our standards and MOPs and we heard about their plans to provide better service and data access to their clients, such as the engineering and design community. And this is only the start of an ongoing dialogue among these great organizations – all of whom are driven by the desire to have a climate resilient future. We all had stories of climate-related disasters and the impacts on the affected people and businesses.
This is the next step in a longer process. We started this partnership several years ago with listening sessions where EWRI members met with NOAA scientists to discuss our needs and their timelines. While much of this has been driven by ASCE 7-28 needs for climate, EWRI was well represented in these discussions. Approximately a year ago, ASCE and NOAA signed an MOU. The guiding principles of that MOU are that ASCE will help identify the needs of the civil engineering community regarding NOAA products and assist in communicating data products and services to the ASCE community. We will incorporate these new products into updates of and new guidance for our community as they design the vertical and horizontal infrastructure of the 21st century. In return, NOAA will invite ASCE to the table early to provide input on the data and modeling priorities as they are being developed, and working with NOAA to find the best way to deliver that information to the engineering and design community.
In addition to this event and the listening sessions, we continue to have many NOAA scientists and engineers as speakers at our conferences. In 2022, Ben DeAngelo, Deputy Director of the Climate Program Office, kicked off this deepening partnership with his keynote address entitled “Utilizing Our Best Available Information for Climate-Ready Infrastructure” at the EWRI Congress in Atlanta. In January 2023, Ko Barrett, NOAA’s Senior Advisor for Climate, keynoted our first international hybrid conference, the 11th International Perspectives on Water and the Environment Conference held in Dhaka, Bangladesh with panelists broadcasting from both Bangladesh and the US. Just this past November, Dr. Spinrad was a keynote speaker at the new ASCE conference, Inspire: Infrastructure Innovation & Adaptation for a Sustainable & Resilient World, which was held in November in Arlington, VA. In May, we are looking forward to welcoming Sandra Pavlovic, who is leading the NOAA Atlas 15 project, to Milwaukee to keynote this year’s EWRI Congress.
We also are holding workshops to identify needs and to develop standards and other guidance, with NOAA as one of our primary federal partners. Starting with listening sessions at the OMSW Conference in Wilmington and the EWRI Congress in Atlanta, through workshops at the EWRI Congress in Henderson and at the Inspire Conference, you are identifying the priorities for our profession so that we can build climate resilient infrastructure, especially with the influx of money from the IIJA and IRA. We are bringing together our dedicated member volunteers to update and create standards and MOPs, to translate climate science from NOAA and from our members’ own research into actionable information for our clients. We are also enhancing our partnerships with many federal agencies.
As your president, I am looking forward to these robust future collaborations! I also am thrilled to see that we, as ASCE, are breaking down the silos between the institutes and other ASCE entities. Today’s panel had the leadership of EWRI, SEI and COPRI all talking about the impacts of climate on infrastructure. The ASCE-NOAA task force meetings have helped us internally to understand how each institute develops their standards and guidance. I know more about ASCE 7 and how it is developed, and also the process for incorporation into the International Building Codes. And SEI knows how we have approached standards in the water profession. We are becoming One ASCE Building a Resilient Future.
Although, with the weather, I’m not sure what season it actually is, I am looking forward to this spring of 2024. We have the Operations and Maintenance of Stormwater Systems Conference in Austin in April and of course, our EWRI Congress in Milwaukee in May. Climate will figure prominently in both. And while at OMSW, we may have a Total Eclipse of the Sun, the future is so bright that our solar shades will get many uses! See you there!