cc  >> Thank you all for joining us  this evening.  I'd like to welcome you to the  seventh seminar series for  Bracing for Impact: Climate  Change Adaptation in Wisconsin,  and it's sponsored by WICCI,  Wisconsin's Initiative on  Climate Change Impacts, a  collaboration between the UW  system and the Wisconsin DNR.  I want to bring your attention  that there's sign-up sheets in  the back there's also schedules  in the back.  In addition the seminars are  going to eventually be shown on  Wisconsin Public Television, but  in the mean time they can be  watched live on the biotech  website if you go to the website  that's listed on the schedule in  the back.  And one point to point out is if  you're using a Mac you have to  use Safari otherwise it won't  work.  So first I want to introduce our  one speaker for tonight, and the  speaker is David Liebl.  David is a statewide stormwater  specialist in the UW Extension  Solid and Hazardous Waste Center  and a faculty associate in the  UW Madison Department of  Engineering Professional  Development.  He leads outreach education to  the Wisconsin municipalities for  developing stormwater management  programs and leads the  development of innovative  stormwater management practices  at the UW Arboretum.  With professor Ken Potter he  co-chairs the WICCI Stormwater  Working Group and conducts  outreach and research with  funding from NOAA.  Thank you. 

 >> Okay, thank you Mike.  Can everybody hear okay?  No.  Turn it up just a little bit?  I don't think that's going to  work.  Yeah, it's on.  There we go.  How's that?  A little bit better?  All right.  Thank you all for coming  tonight.  It's not raining yet.  And I just was kind of curious  how many people in the audience  really like a good rain storm?  Okay.  How many of you like to go out  in the rain and wander up and  down the gutters and see where  the water goes?  (laughter)  As -- would say, you  are the mystics in the audience. 

 And I'm going to be speaking to  you particularly tonight about  stormwater and its impacts and  how we expect climatic  variability, or what is  sometimes called climate change,  to affect the way that we manage  stormwater.  I'm giving this talk, Ken Potter  in the audience, raise your hand  Ken, is my partner in this  effort.  We co-chair a working group with  the Wisconsin Initiative on  Climate Change.  And we're going to talk about  some of the future scenarios  that have been developed for  precipitation.  I'm sure all of you have seen  some of these scenarios for  temperature.  And we're going to look at those  in the context of what the  historic record also tells us  about precipitation.  From that we'll talk a little  bit about some of the impacts  that are commonly the result of  rainfall, especially intense  storms, and then what can we do  to adapt the way that we design  and manage our stormwater  infrastructure so that we can  cope with what may be coming in  terms of precipitation related  to climatic variability.  I want to start out by saying  that this presentation is a  result of an extremely  collaborative process with a  good number of people.  These are the members of the  stormwater working group, and we  have been working on a program  funding by NOAA, the Sectoral  Applications Research Program or  SARP.  So let's talk about changing  climate for a minute. 

 Most of you have seen the chart  on the left that shows a  gradually rising temperature  over the next hundred years.  We're expecting a 2- to 6-degree  Centigrade or 3- to 10-degree  Fahrenheit rise in temperature  by the end of the century.  Precipitation, however, is a  little bit more difficult to  predict, and the climate models  that have been used are  certainly a little more  equivocal in what we might  expect.  Here is a close analysis for  Wisconsin of future of  precipitation in the year 2090.  And this is a result of  combining or overlaying the  results of 15 global climate  models.  Dave Lorenz did this.  He's over at the Center for  Climate Research, one of our  partners in this project.  The black line that you see  here, here's the temperature  change, here's the precipitation  change over that time period.  That is the mean or the average  of all of these different models  and should give go us a general  idea of what to expect at the  end of this century in  comparison to today.  And so we're seeing, for  example, January temperatures in  the 20s of degrees Fahrenheit as  compared today. 

 A 10-degree Fahrenheit rise.  We're looking at wetter  springtime and a somewhat dryer  summertime.  So again, this is a prediction  based on models using  information that's available to  us today.  The models also tell us a little  bit about what we can expect in  terms of the intensity of  precipitation.  And this chart done by Steve  Vavrus, also at the Center for  Climate Research shows us the  percentage change in intensity  of our most extreme rainfall  events.  That's what 95th percentile  means, so the top 5% of our  intense rainfalls.  How are they going to look at  the end of the 21st century.  And looking at this we see a  fairly dramatic increase in  intensity in this area here,  late winter, spring and early  summer.  And possibly a decrease here,  but again these are a number of  different climate models giving  slightly different results, in  some cases dramatically  different results as we see here  in the summertime.  So these are relatively  intriguing. 

 They tell us that in 2099 we'd  be wetter overall by about  two-tenths of an inch per month.  That summers would be slightly  dryer by about a quarter of an  inch per month.  The springtime, in particular,  would be wetter, maybe by as  much as half an inch per month.  And intense rainfalls would  increase by up to 50%,  especially in the springtime,  over what they are now.  So the question that we ask is  should we be investing millions  of dollars at this point?  Should we be trying to adapt our  infrastructure that manages  stormwater in anticipation of  what these climate models are  predicting for the end of the  century.  Well, one way to test that  question is to take a look at  how the climate models work with  historical data.  And again this is Dave Lorenz's  work overlaying the difference  between, excuse me, using the  same 15 global climate models on  the period of 1980 to 1999 and  using those models, predicting  what the temperature trend would  be and what the precipitation  trend would be for that recent  time period.  And as you can see, consistent  with what we've been saying, is  that the temperature prediction  is fairly consistent, uniform,  the models agree very well, they  agree with what has been  happening historically.  And we look down here though in  the precipitation predictions  and there's a good deal of  variability, I think, especially  in these early spring months and  in the summer months between the  different models.  And that is holding true for the  recent historical data the same  way that it does for the  predictions of the future. 

 Now we can also look at actual  precipitation events, not just  what models tell us about what  has been happening but going  out, Wisconsin has a big network  of cooperative weather stations  and Chris Kucharik has gone back  and looked at that data from  1950 to 2006 and tried to  identify if there have been any  trends in precipitation over  Wisconsin, and what he has found  is if you look at this bar at  the bottom, this would be  decreasing, this would be  increasing to the right.  So these areas that have much  darker colors are increased  precipitation over that time  period.  About 2- to 6-inches per year  overall for southern Wisconsin  increase in annual precipitation  from 1950 to 2006.  That seems like it maybe a  substantial and significant  amount of increase.  As I said we've been measuring  rainfall for a long time so what  happens if we go back further in  history, look at more data, try  and identify any trends that  might reflect what's going on  with the climate as we know it.  Well, Ken Potter and his  students have done this work.  This is for the period from  about 1870 to 2009 and this is  the heaviest rainfall events for  Madison, Wisconsin, during that  period.  And we see a slight rise I think  in those rainfall events as we  move into the future from the  turn of the century.  Now that's Madison, Wisconsin,  that's one point in place.  Is it representative of the rest  of the Midwest or the rest of  Wisconsin?  Here is the flow of the  Mississippi river at Clinton,  Iowa. 

 Clinton is south of Wisconsin so  the cachements of Wisconsin  drains through here.  It drains also, obviously,  Minnesota, eastern Minnesota.  So we've got a representation of  the flow at Clinton, Iowa,  maximum flow in these years that  correlates reasonably well,  apparently, with heavy rainfall  increase that we see from  Madison.  And so what we're thinking is  that we may be looking at a  trend that takes place over  decades.  It may be part of a normal cycle  of climate variation.  It may also be a reversal of a  longer trend that we don't have  data for and foreshadow the  increase that these models are  showing us.  We don't really know for sure.  Again, taking a look at more  specifically the precipitation  events at Madison.  Remember the slide that showed a  substantial increase in the  intensity of the storms.  Here we see this will be the  number of 1-inch daily  precipitation events, in other  words the days in which we get a  1-inch rainfall. 

 The number per decade beginning  in the 1940s and going up to the  current time.  And we see a sort of general  rise that's consistent with what  we've been seeing in the other  data.  And we also see that there's  been a dramatic increase at  least in the last decade or so  of the heaviest rainfall events  compared to earlier in the  century.  Now, the national weather  service keeps a record of  rainfall events in Wisconsin.  They have kind of a top 10 list  for some of the major cities.  For Madison, which is the red,  and Milwaukee, which is the  brown, and I apologize if  someone can't discriminate  between those two colors,  they're fairly close.  But you can see that while there  are large storm events scattered  around the beginning of the  century, there do seem to be  quite a number toward of end of  the century.  Is this a trend?  We can't actually answer that  question at this time.  But it certainly is suggestive  and supportive of everything  that we've been seeing so far in  terms of describing an  environment where the climate is  giving us a little bit more  rainfall, perhaps more intense  rainfall especially in the  springtime or late winter.  So rather than talking about  climate variability, upcoming  climate change, what's going to  happening at the end of the  century, we're beginning to  focus on where are we now. 

 Is our climate changing already,  and is our infrastructure  designed to accommodate this  apparent increase in rainfall.  I'm going to take a step back  now from the data and talk a  little bit about how we manage  stormwater.  I'm going to give you some  background as we move through  this so that you can get a sense  of the impacts of rainfall and  what we might expect as rainfall  events become possibly more  intense or possibly more  frequent.  These pictures should not be  particularly unusual.  They've been in the news.  We'll talk about some of these  specifics a little bit later.  But these are the types of  impacts that we try to manage  when we manage stormwater.  In Wisconsin flooding, it seems,  comes in three varieties.  We have our stream, river and  lake flooding, similar to what  we had in June of 2008 when a  large part of, for instance, the  Baraboo watershed was  underwater.  We have local urban flooding  which can happen from a dramatic  downpour over a very small  cachements on the west side of  Madison, for example, where this  picture was taken. 

 Hard to say how much water came  down, but maybe a half an inch  within an hour or so.  And then we have something that  maybe some of you are not as  familiar with which is  groundwater flooding.  And I'm going to talk a little  bit more about groundwater  flooding because I think it's a  phenomenon that is of interest  and has some potential  implications for how we develop  in our communities, where we  build and so forth.  Groundwater flooding is  essentially a situation where  the infiltration of rainfall  into the water table, into the  ground exceeds transpiration by  plants and exceeds the ability  of the soil to lose that water  through drainage.  And that drainage will come from  through springs or in the rivers  and lakes.  Several factors influence  whether or not we have  groundwater flooding or how  intense or severe it might be.  For example, if we have snow  pack over the winter time, we  have a very light frost, that  facilitates infiltration of  snowmelt and rain very early in  the spring.  The snow pack also contributes  to the amount of available  moisture to go into the ground  as soon as it begins to melt.  Early rains before plants have  leafed out, do not have any  transpiration affects.  In other words, the roots aren't  really taking up any of the  water, it's headed straight down  into the groundwater. 

 And when we have periods of  persistent wet weather, we can  exceed the ability of the soil,  depending on the type of soil or  the surrounding topography or  underlying geology, we can  exceed its ability to actually  drain that water away.  And when this happens over a  period of months to years we're  talking about groundwater  flooding.  And this is a cemetery in Spring  Green, Wisconsin, from last  summer, and believe me the  people of Spring Green did not  site their cemetery on a wetland  intentionally.  This is just a phenomenon that's  related to the what we call  antecedent or preceding  conditions of a fairly heavy  snow pack, not very deep frost  and heavy rains in the early  part of the year.  So groundwater flooding is one  issue that they need to be  thinking about managing.  Upland runoff, fairly  straightforward.  Again, influenced by springtime  conditions, the heavy snow pack  provides water storage.  Frost and high soil moisture  would retard infiltration in  this case.  And steep slopes, and poor  ground cover in particular,  encourage runoff.  When that combines with heavy  rainfall we get this type of  situation. 

 This is the Baraboo River.  Urban runoff is just a little  bit different than that.  Here we have a situation where  we have impervious surfaces,  rooftops, streets, driveways,  sidewalks.  In this case we have a cement  --, this is the Kinnickinnic  River in Milwaukee.  All of these have a tendency to  prevent infiltration and  concentrate the flow of runoff  making it more, having more  energy, more volume and more  speed as it moves to the lake.  When we get heavy rainfall under  those conditions this is what  happens.  We get flooding of streets, etc.  Excuse me.  One of the other impacts of  heavy runoff is erosion and  sedimentation.  And this picture is a good  example of where you might find  runoff from an urban area  entering into a natural area,  cutting through the soil and  exposing the subsoil, washing  that sediment down into the  nearest water body. 

 Other impacts of heavy runoff  include washing out bridges,  roads, railways.  Flood damages to buildings.  In the urban environment we have  what are called best management  practices, or BMPs, that are  meant to hold stormwater or  infiltrate stormwater, remove  the sediment and phosphorus and  then pass it on into the  groundwater or into surface  water.  This is an example of a  biofiltration device an  engineered rain garden in the  median of the parking lot.  Heavy persistent rainfall can  saturate these devices, making  them ineffective, possibly  killing the plants in them.  Storm drain surcharging is  really a storm drain, and I  don't use the term storm sewer  here because we don't want to  confuse it with a sanitary sewer  where the human waste gets  treated by the wastewater  treatment plant.  Storm sewers are generally  separate sewer systems.  So we call them storm drains.  Heavy rainfall events will fill  these with water to the point  where hydraulic action can  create damage to this system  itself.  In this case it's broken this  trash gate off just by its  velocity. 

 And detention ponds, wet ponds  that are designed to hold water,  allow sediment to fall out,  remove phosphorus, if they're  not designed correctly, if  they're not designed to handle  large storm flows, can fail like  this one did.  You see these people standing in  the background.  This is the basin of a pond that  should be under water at this  point.  And this has been washed out by  a large storm and drained into a  joining wetland.  I want to talk briefly about the  concept of sanitary sewer  overflows.  As I mentioned, most communities  have separate sanitary sewer and  separate storm drains.  Some communities, like Milwaukee  for example, have combined  system, and they've spent  millions of dollars trying to  manage storm water and septic  waste at the same time and get  it all through their wastewater  treatment plant.  That works fairly well up to a  certain storm size, and then  those types of devices are  overwhelmed.  But even separate systems have  problems.  The Madison Sanitary Sewer  District is designed to  accommodate additional urban  development, about 15% more than  it has right now. 

 But when it rains that capacity  is completely taken up by the  water that's coming in off the  streets, through the pipes and  leaks, through basements where  it comes in through basement  windows into the floor drains  and goes into the sanitary  sewer.  So that's all that extra water  coming into a system that's  really not designed to handle  it.  What it ends up resulting is  direct discharge to lakes and  streams, drinking water  contamination.  On the right we can see the  Menominee River discharging into  Milwaukee Harbor and out into  Lake Michigan after a storm  event.  So in addition to those threats  to our built infrastructure,  most of you, I think, are aware  of some of the ecological  impacts of heavy runoff.  This is a picture of upper  Maunesha River, north of  Waterloo in north eastern Dane  County.  And this blue dotted line is  actually the river course that's  running through this large  feedlot here.  When you have a situation like  this and our good bovine friends  you're undoubtedly going to get  tremendous amounts of nutrient  runoff every time it rains hard.  Here's another example of an  upland field with no control at  all for runoff draining down,  taking with it sediment.  That's very similar to what we  see in the background of this  picture here. 

 And as we move down into the  river we have areas where heavy  flows are undercutting banks,  and in Wisconsin with our high  phosphorous soils that extra  sediment then does add more  nutrients to the water and when  we get down to our lakes and  streams we end up with this.  Algal blooms, heavy weed growth,  fish kills.  Something that we've been trying  to avoid through stormwater  manage for a number of years.  In addition to those types of  ecological impacts, there's what  we could call habitat  disruption, basic erosion, basic  crop flooding.  Soil saturation that doesn't  allow plants to thrive.  Sedimentation, as you see in a  case like this where a sediment  control device is being  overwhelmed by a heavy storm  flow.  These are all problems now.  But as storm size increases and  runoff increases these problems  become much more serious.  And we don't have to look any  farther than June of 2008 to see  what the total impact of this  heavy runoff can be.  This is the rainfall totals for  the first two weeks in June. 

 Wisconsin up here, especially in  the Baraboo watershed, 12 to 14  inches of rain.  What did it cost us?  Well, we had 28% of the wells  that were tested were  contaminated with E. coli.  We had 90 million-gallons of raw  sewage that was discharged to  surface waters because the  treatment plants, the publicly  operated treatment works, could  not handle that volume of water  and had to bypass directly into  surface waters.  38 river gauges on those rivers  had record flows from those rain  events.  800 miles of land was flooded,  $34 million in damage to  property.  So if we're thinking ahead and  we're thinking about heavier  precipitation, storms coming  possibly closer together in  certain times of the year, this  could be the scenario that we're  looking at for different parts  of Wisconsin.  Engineers have been designing to  manage stormwater as long as  there have been engineers.  I think I can say that safely.  It's one of the things that  people have had to deal with  from the beginning of time  really.  And we really put a lot of  effort into making sure that the  infrastructure that we build is  resistant to the impacts of  stormwater. 

 And failure sometimes can be  very costly.  This, of course, is Lake Delton,  where a dam that was built I  believe in the last century was  overwhelmed and bypassed and a  new channel cut to the Wisconsin  River by a storm event that was  not anticipated.  Now the design that we use for  our infrastructure is based on  experience and that experience  comes from history.  And you can see here that the  Department of Commerce, this is  a document from 1961, used a  tremendous amount of rainfall  data to try and tell us how much  rainfall we could expect in  different parts of the United  States.  They used 200 primary, 5,000  secondary, weather stations,  looking at rainfall data from  1938 to 1958.  I'm not going to explain this in  much detail, the point that I  want to make though is that the  result of that statistical  analysis gives us design  standards that we have been  using when we size storm drains,  underpasses, detention ponds,  dams, all the things that is  we've been seeing.  For Madison, the hundred year  event, which for a designer is  the maximum amount of rain that  you typically design for, is a  7-inch rainfall.  About half of what they  experienced last summer up in  the Baraboo area.  The other point that I want to  make is if you look at the time  periods when those data were  taken, and that is here and  here, going back to those  rainfalls from Madison and the  Mississippi River at Clinton,  where is that on this curve?  Should we be designing for a  change in climate?  Are we using data from a dryer  period?  These are the kind of questions  that we're faced with as we look  at climatic variability and  climate change and its effects  on stormwater management  To try to get the answers to  this we convened a group of  experts in the field from a wide  array of different disciplines  and experience to talk through  what some of these issues are.  This is the Wisconsin Initiative  on Climate Change Impacts  Stormwater Working Group. 

 We've had about two years worth  of meetings.  It's been very, very, very  productive.  These are some of the things  that they've told us.  They want us to use the latest  rainfall statistics that we can.  They'd like us to use climate  scenarios to evaluate  vulnerabilities.  If it's going to rain this much,  where in my system do I have to  worry about runoff or flooding  or whatever other issue is  important to me?  Excuse me.  I'll go on with some more of  these specifics as we move  through here, but basically the  bottom line was they would like  us to help them adapt to a  change in climate.  And it's not as easy as simply  fudging the numbers.  There has to be broad consensus  in the engineering community, in  the environmental regulatory  community, in the legal world,  on how we apply new knowledge to  existing designs because there  are very important cost and  liability questions that depend  on that information.  We have, however, I think,  identified a few unsuccessful  strategies. 

 Obviously as you build bigger  storm drains you just move more  water downstream and the next  person has to deal with.  Dredging streams and lakes to  make this deeper, to make them  handle water better, same  problem.  You can build as many levees as  you want but there's always  going to be a bigger storm.  The taller the levee, the more  water behind it, and when it  fails, the more dramatic the  results.  So these are traditional  approaches that have been used  for the last hundred years for  stormwater management and maybe  we need to be moving away from  that just a little bit.  So here are some of those  adaptation strategies that we  mentioned.  Vulnerability analysis.  This would help people  understand where the risk in  their community is from  increased rainfall and runoff.  Evolving process of engineering  design.  In other words, instead of  sticking with data that's from  the last half of the 20th  century, how do we incorporate  new data as it becomes available  and new understanding of our  climate situation?  We need to be able to have a way  of effectively evaluating the  cost impacts of either making  change to accommodate more  dramatic flows or the damage  that may happen if we do  nothing. 

 And right now we don't really  have the tools in place for  doing that.  Obviously, coming from  Extension, I want to say that  education is also a very  important part of this because  if the public is not aware of  what's coming down the road  they're going to be very  reluctant to provide the  political background, to provide  the political support to make  these things happen.  Now we've developed, as a  working group, a number of  examples.  This is for adaptive design.  I'm not going to spend the rest  of the evening talking about all  of them, although some of us in  the audience find that extremely  interesting.  But I will just take a few out  of these bullet points and  provide you a little bit of  background on them.  So you remember that I've made a  big point of the fact that the  data we've been using for design  is coming from a time that might  be a little bit dryer than we  are in now.  So one of the things that we've  been talking about is how do we  develop design standards that  use more representative rainfall  data.  Some of that is already being  done.  This is NOAA Atlas. 

 It's an effort to update that  document that I showed before,  TP40, with more recent data.  It's been done for Illinois,  Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.  And for Illinois you can see  that the increases that we are  seeing in the size of the events  for the most heavy storm, the  one hundred year storm, are on  the order of 5%, 7. 5%  to 8%, 10%.  So that helps a little bit.  This is going to be done for  Wisconsin in two years I think.  So that will give us a little  bit better, more current data to  apply to our design approach.  We can also plan more  adaptively, thinking ahead to  what we perceive as being the  likely direction the climate is  going and what that's going to  mean for precipitation.  This is, again, another list of  many things that we can be  doing.  But I'm going to focus for a  second on education about  building in flood prone areas.  Now this is an interesting  series of slides to me. 

 On the right we have two older  buildings.  The one on the bottom you'll  notice is raised up above the  surrounding landscape.  So whenever somebody built that  house they must have known that  there was a little bit of  flooding that went on there  every once in a while.  If you were near a river or a  lake that raised its banks ever  once in a while that would be  obvious.  This is Spring Green, out in the  valley, a long way from any  water.  This is groundwater flooding  that's causing this pooling.  If you look at the two  photographs on the left these  are new buildings that have been  put into a development out there  where people were told that  there's groundwater flooding in  these areas you shouldn't be  building houses.  And those houses are standing  under water all last summer.  On the right is another run from  Clear Lake in Rock County, and  again there's an older dwelling  on a lake that doesn't really  have any type of inlet except  for groundwater.  We had a serious case of  groundwater flooding last year. 

 Do we need to educate people  about the potential for that and  how do we do it?  Do we have the information that  we need to predict groundwater  flooding?  In addition to planning and  design, there's the management  aspect.  And to adapt our management to  changing conditions we have a  number of questions that we need  to address.  Some of these are fairly  straightforward.  I'm going to talk about flow of  management versus TSS removal.  And I'm sure everybody knows  what TSS stands for.  So I won't have to explain that  it means total suspended solids  which is the way we measure how  much sediment is in water, and  along with that how much  phosphorus is in the water  that's running off into the  lakes.  This is a currently under  construction stormwater  management facility at the UW  Arboretum that's been designed  around this question of flow  management versus sediment  removal.  The blue line coming in from the  left is a storm drain.  It drains Arbor Hills and the  Beltline from the Todd Drive  area.  It is capable of carrying a lot  of water. 

 This large open area up here is  a flat wetland basin that will  be planted with native species  that's meant to remove  phosphorus and sediment,  possibly some nitrogen before  draining the water back down  towards Lake Wingra.  This basin in no way can handle  these types of flows.  What's constructed here, or will  be constructed here, is a  diverter that takes about  one-third of that water and  spills it off into this smaller  basin right here, allowing the  rest of this water to go down a  concrete flume into a standard  detention pond which is in this  area here.  That type of thinking about how  we handle runoff and how we  treat it is going to have to  become more common if we're  faced with increased flows from  more intense storms.  Also, in addition to planning  and design and management, we  think that the system users, the  engineers, the municipal  operators, the people that live  around stormwater runoff are  going to also have to do some  adaptation.  And in particularly one sector  that I think most of us have a  feeling needs to address some  runoff issues and that's the ag    sector.  And one of the things that we're  looking overall in terms of its  ability to reduce some of that  upland runoff that we saw  earlier that's caused by  uncovered soil under heavy  rainfall is something called  conservation tillage where, in  this case, corn stover, what's  chopped up after the corn is  harvested, is left on the ground  and a row is planted without  tilling every year.  And in the picture above that  you see a cover crop of clover  under wheat again providing  protection for the soil while at  the same time it provides  nitrogen for the wheat crop.  So this is an area where we're  looking to our ag partners to  better manage or increase their  stewardship of the land to avoid  the impact of some of these  heavy rainfall events.  Now to make this all happen we  have a tremendous amount of  things that we don't know. 

 That we'd like to know that  would make it easier for us to  work forward and looking at how  we're going to manage heavy  rainfall events.  Again, this is almost a laundry  list.  I'm really not going to go  through all of them.  But I would like to focus on one  where we are actually doing  something now and this is this  first one a fine scale rainfall  data.  You remember the picture of the  cooperative weather stations in  Wisconsin.  Madison has two certified rain  gauges.  One is as Truax Field the other  one is at the UW Arboretum.  It doesn't tell us very much  what's happening in Shorewood or  Maple Bluff or Waunakee if we  can only get data from Arbor  Hills and the far east side of  Madison.  A technique that's recently been  under development on the east  coast is to combine rainfall  gauge data with weather radar  data to be able to use the radar  to give us a better sense of how  much rain is falling over a very  small area.  And on the left what we have  here is typical -- that you all  see on TV or on your computer,  and on the right it's the same  storm except the resolution has  been improved by using the  information that they've gained  over time from the rainfall  gauges in that area. 

 And we'll be holding a workshop  later this summer sponsored by  NOAA to investigate whether this  type of tool to get better  rainfall data is feasible in  Wisconsin and how we can use it  to help us manage our water  resources a little bit better.  So in summary, this has been a  lot of material, a lot of  concepts that you might not be  familiar with.  But in the end I always tell  people it rains and the water  flows downhill and that's all  there is to it.  So let me summarize briefly what  we've been trying to get across  here tonight.  Climate predictions indicate an  increase in the amount and  intensity of precipitation,  especially in late winter and  spring.  Recent precipitation events may  be a trend that is consistent  with these predictions.  May be is the operative part of  that sentence.  Our runoff management decisions  are often based on design models  derived from dryer conditions.  The conclusion I think is that  we should reevaluate our design  criteria to accommodate  increased heavy rainfall and  groundwater flooding.  And what does that mean for  water resource management?  Should we invest millions of  dollars in adapting our  infrastructure based on the  global climate models?  Probably not just yet. 

 Should we be certain that our  systems can cope with the events  of the magnitude that we've  really seen?  That probably would be a good  idea.  But to be able to move forward  effectively we need better data,  we need better monitoring and  prediction systems especially  for groundwater, surface water,  rainfall.  We need to update our  engineering design standards.  And as you might expect, there  may be some tough choices here.  We may find ourselves beginning  to manage for water quantity  versus water quality.  We may find that we're moving  people out of flood plain areas.  We've done that in a few places,  La Farge for example.  Recently, I think, Oregon bought  out some homes that were prone  to flooding.  This may become more common.  We may have to put some  restrictions on how areas are  developed, especially areas that  have a history of groundwater  flooding or are former wetlands. 

 We might have to insist on  modified cropping practices to  reduce the amount of erosion and  runoff that we get from  agricultural areas.  And we will undoubtedly have to  make an investment in upgrading  our infrastructure.  Well, the WICCI working group on  stormwater has got some next  steps.  As I mentioned, we're going to  take a look at this radar  calibration approach for  modeling rainfall data.  We're going to be working with  our partners on identify what  type of design tools that we can  develop for wet weather design.  We're going to look at how we  can modify some basic design  criteria and the standards that  we use for designing for heavy  rainfall events.  We'd like to develop some case  study examples of what would  happen, the scenarios in  communities, coastal  communities, other communities,  where rainfall events like we  saw in the Baraboo watershed  haven't happened but could, what  should they expect and can they  prepare for that now.  And of course, in continued  public education like we're  doing tonight to support our  approach to adaptation.  So let's be sure that today's  designs are adequate for  today's storms.  And let's use a cost benefit  approach to justify any  retrofitting of existing  infrastructure that we have now  as we move forward into a new  and changing climate. 

 And with that, any questions?  (applause)