Design Rainfall in a Changing Climate: Recent Progress and Remaining Challenges

Extreme rainfall is critical in a wide range of infrastructure planning and design applications. It is also one of the most rapidly changing manifestations of climate warming, though in ways that are difficult to quantify via critical engineering metrics such as the 100-year rainfall depth. For this reason, I refer to design rainfall, especially at the subdaily scale, as a “grand challenge” for the scientific and engineering community. In this presentation/panel, I outline the problem, review recent progress—much of it extremely promising—and close with some of the remaining issues, which have less to do with climate change and more to do with the poor state of current observational networks, historical data records, and simplifying assumptions within engineering design practice.