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Flooding is occurring more with climate change. But flood risk models are behind, new report finds

People stand at the entrance to a pizza shop as water floods a street, in Scituate, Mass., Friday, March 2, 2018. A major nor'easter pounded the East Coast on Friday, packing heavy rain and strong winds as residents from the mid-Atlantic to Maine braced for coastal flooding.
Steven Senne
/
AP
People stand at the entrance to a pizza shop as water floods a street, in Scituate, Mass., Friday, March 2, 2018. A major nor'easter pounded the East Coast on Friday, packing heavy rain and strong winds as residents from the mid-Atlantic to Maine braced for coastal flooding.

A report out this week suggests that federal models for predicting precipitation don't fully account for the bigger storms driven by climate change.

Jeremy Porter, of the weather research nonprofit First Street Foundation, says the gold standard for precipitation models was created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But he says flooding is becoming more frequent than the NOAA model suggests, especially in the New England and mid-Atlantic areas.

"You can see that a 1-in-100 year depth from the NOAA precipitation records actually is observed in our current climate about once every 20 years," Porter says. "So we're actually seeing it four or five times more often than we should see, given the precipitation records."

Porter says NOAA will be updating its precipitation estimates by 2027. In the interim, the foundation's website offers some of its own flood risk data.

Murray Carpenter is Maine Public’s climate reporter, covering climate change and other environmental news.