Biden administration launches website to help navigate extreme weather, other climate hazards

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has launched a website that will help communities, agencies and individuals see and track extreme weather and other climate-related hazards in real time and what will happen in the future, the Biden administration announced Friday afternoon.

The Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation portal (CMRA) will help state, local, Tribal, and territorial governments and leaders better track real-time affects and access federal resources for long-term planning.

The new portal also brings together federal information sources and funding opportunities to help communities better prepare for and respond to climate impacts — including historic resilience funding from the president’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Together with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration is providing historic levels of support to expand resilience programs, protect U.S. communities, economies, and infrastructure from the worsening impacts of climate change, and improve the nation’s climate mapping and data capabilities, the White House said.

The CMRA portal is a first-of-its kind hub that will help communities, federal agencies, and other levels of government better understand current exposure to climate risks to strengthen their resilience plans. The portal, which will continue to evolve to meet community needs, includes:

• Real-time monitoring dashboard: To help track climate-related hazards affecting communities each day, a new dashboard brings together maps showing areas currently under extreme heat advisories, drought conditions, and inland and coastal flooding warnings, as well as the locations of active wildfires and areas of poor air quality they produce.
• Assessments of local climate exposure: The portal also helps communities understand their historic and future exposure to climate impacts. The portal’s Assessment Tool provides hazard reports on heat, drought, and flooding down to the census tract level based on climate models used in the U.S. National Climate Assessment.
• Funding opportunities and other federal resources: The portal also centralizes available federal data, programs, and funding opportunities, including resources for extreme heat, drought, wildfire, flooding, and coastal inundation and sea level rise.

The web portal is an outgrowth of a National Climate Task Force initiative to provide more accessible climate information and decision tools, as directed by President Biden in his executive order on tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad. As part of this initiative, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) last year launched a redesigned Climate.gov and this year the National Integrated Heat Health Information System launched Heat.gov using data sources now incorporated into the CMRA portal.

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