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By improving access to environmental data that informs building design, codes, and standards, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is building resilience for a prosperous future.
Construction, both private and public, was valued at $2.2 trillion in 2024 – all of it impacted by weather and climate. Extreme weather events such as flooding, high wind, and extreme temperatures can degrade building materials, threaten the safety of critical infrastructure, and cause significant damage or destruction to facilities.
Most infrastructure investments are built to last for decades– more than 97% of the dams managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are over 30 years old. Architects and engineers rely on accurate, timely, and future-facing climate and weather data to ensure buildings and infrastructure are designed to withstand not just the environmental conditions of today, but the weather of tomorrow.
NOAA is working with the architecture and engineering sector, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and American Institute of Architects (AIA), to accelerate the development of weather-informed engineering codes and standards and equip the industry to build and design climate-resilient infrastructure.
Our Goal
By improving access to and the functionality of its informational products and services, NCEI aims to connect architects and engineers with the environmental information needed to design data-driven building codes and standards, creating more efficient and weather-ready designs for a future with safer communities and a stronger economy.
Data-Driven Impacts for Architecture and Engineering
The architecture and engineering sector needs contextual, downscaled, current, and future projected environmental data to build infrastructure that is resilient to extreme weather.
Weather and climate data inform every stage of infrastructure, from the initial designs to demolition. Architects use climate and weather data when they design buildings to make them energy- and cost-efficient, taking into account data such as humidity, wind, precipitation, and solar irradiance.
Engineers make building material and design decisions by referring to codes and standards that are set based on NOAA’s climate and weather data, including potential snow load, wind speed, extreme temperatures, and flooding. All of these decisions ensure that the infrastructure is built to withstand both normal and extreme weather while minimizing maintenance costs.
"Every building in America is built from wood, concrete, steel, and NOAA data."
Deke Arndt
Director, National Centers for Environmental Information
Through workshops and working group discussions, NOAA is working with engineers and architects to develop customized, forward-looking tools and datasets that enable the industry to more accurately account for current and future weather and climate conditions in their building designs. NOAA is developing a variety of tools that address specific technical needs stakeholders have shared, including:
A Typical Meteorological Year product that provides current and future “typical” weather information for a given area to support architects’ energy-related design decisions.
A high-impact Precipitation Time Series Explorer tool is a new interface for the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System data that provides quantifiable precipitation estimates for any given location in the U.S. both historically and in near real-time to better understand exceedance potential, frequency, and risk of extreme rainfall events over design criteria.
An innovative Icing product that will support architects’ and engineers’ efforts to mitigate or prevent the negative impacts of icing on structures.
Through its partnership with NOAA, the industry will be able to understand the current and future environmental conditions that will affect its infrastructure, enabling companies to make safe, resilient, and cost-efficient decisions in these significant investments.
Products
Story Maps
- Extreme Precipitation in the U.S.
- We May Not Be in Kansas Anymore: May 2024 Severe Weather Becomes a $20 Billion-Dollar Disaster
- Supply Chains & Damage Claims: Hurricanes and Their Impact
- Coastal Dynamics of Sea Level Rise: Simulated Storm Surge
- The Great Texas Freeze: February 2021
NOAA Resources
- National Hurricane Center
- NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD)
- National Ocean Service Hydrographic Survey & Tools
- National Weather Service
- Sea Level Rise Viewer
- 5th National Climate Assessment
- Monthly State of the Climate Reports
- Climate at a Glance Tool
- Climate.gov: Global Climate Dashboard
- Heat.gov
- Drought.gov