NTM President Donna Newell, MS, PE, CFM has been named to the Transportation Research Board’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program’s (NCHRP) Panel for Project 15-61, Applying Climate Change Information to Hydrologic and Hydraulic Design of Transportation Infrastructure. Donna participated in the panel’s kickoff on February 8-9, 2016, in Washington, DC.
Transportation hydraulic engineers are being asked to account for global climate change within hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) design practice. Current H&H design procedures stipulate use of historical data while climate change introduces risks such as sea level and temperature rise, and changes in timing and distribution of precipitation, snowpack, and snowmelt. Research is needed to provide hydraulic engineers with practical tools to account for the effects of climate change in hydraulic design where appropriate and justify when such changes are not warranted for a project of a particular type or scale. The objective of this NCHRP research project is to develop a design guide of national scope to provide hydraulic engineers with the tools needed to amend practice to account for climate change.