NOAA was developing tool to help communities prepare for extreme rainfall. Trump officials stopped it.

The Commerce Department has indefinitely suspended work on a tool to help communities predict how rising global temperatures will alter the frequency of extreme rainfall, according to three current and former federal officials familiar with the decision, a move that experts said will make the country more vulnerable to storms supercharged by climate change.

The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks, and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.