By now, even if environmental news isn't very often on your radar, you probably have heard that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States. And in case you haven't noticed, extreme weather and its impacts are more common these days. That is just what scientists have for years been predicting would happen as a result of global warming.

In some areas, this has appeared in the form of record heat. Others have been struck by waves of cold not seen in decades. In some places, ups and downs between one day's heat and the next day's cold have been spectacular. Drought, wildfires and extraordinary flooding are playing havoc in places where these have not been common and have become more extreme in places where they are familiar occurrences. Nebraska and Wyoming had their driest years on record in 2012. Rainstorms and snowstorms in New England are getting bigger.

This extreme weather isn't a fluke. As a consequence, one thing that is going to be needed more than ever are accurate federal maps used, among other things, to determine premiums Americans pay for flood insurance. The maps are drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and it's not having an easy time of it. Theodoric Meyer of the investigative website ProPublica reports:



Congress has cut funding for updating flood maps by more than half since 2010, from $221 million down to $100 million this year. And the president’s latest budget request would slash funding for mapping even further to $84 million—a drop of 62 percent over the last four years. In a little-noticed written response to questions from a congressional hearing, FEMA estimated the cuts would delay its map program by three to five years. The program “will continue to make progress, but more homeowners will rely on flood hazard maps that are not current,” FEMA wrote. The cuts have slowed efforts to update flood maps across the country. In New England, for instance, FEMA is updating coastal maps but has put off updating many flood maps along the region’s rivers, said Kerry Bogdan, a senior engineer with FEMA’s floodplain mapping program in Boston.

The obsolescence of these flood maps would be bad news under any circumstances. But the program is already behind, decades behind, in updating. The old maps are often not terribly accurate even for the period when they were published because they were made in the days before laser techniques and computerized record-keeping provided better data.

The problem hasn't gone totally unnoticed in Congress, according to ProPublica. One representative, Democratic Rep. David E. Price of North Carolina, who sits on the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing FEMA's budget, is seeking a modest increase of $10 million a year for mapping. A drop in the bucket.

Congress itself has authorized the government to spend $400 million a year for five years as part of an overhaul of the mapping program. An improvement but not enough, said Larry Larson. He's director emeritus of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a trade organization. “To get the mapping done, you need probably $400 million a year for 10 years,” Larson said.