Equipping municipalities with climate change data to inform stormwater management

Project overview

Much of the stormwater infrastructure in Minnesota is aging and incapable of handling the current volume and frequency of precipitation events, let alone the more extreme precipitation events predicted by climate change models. Furthermore, very few Minnesota cities or townships incorporate climate change data when planning, designing and implementing stormwater and wastewater infrastructure. Climate change is not expected to affect all parts of Minnesota equally, but past projections have not sufficiently captured geographic and temporal variation at levels useful for policy decision making. 

Our group recently completed a four-year project to create the best available climate change projections at unprecedented fine-scale resolutions appropriate for local planning. However, model outputs need processing, formatting, and interpretation before they are accessible to decision makers.

This project aims to equip local governments with climate change data that is directly applicable and accessible to them. We have two objectives:

1. To produce customized climate change reports for municipalities across the state.
2. To engage at a deeper level with Minnesota’s most vulnerable cities to inform stormwater planning efforts, help find funding for innovative solutions, increase resiliency, and prepare for a wetter future.

Research findings

• This project showed that short-term climate data can be used to estimate rainfall patterns with relatively good accuracy.
• Extreme, rare storms as well as short storms were more difficult to predict. This demonstrates a need for better models and data, as these events will become more common as climate change progresses.
• Data from NOAA was used to give each county in Minnesota a personalized precipitation report