NCTCOG Webinar: "Decision-making Tools for Extreme Heat and Stormwater Flood Mitigation in the Dallas Metro Area"

Join the NCTCOG and Smart Surfaces Coalition for the webinar, "Decision-making Tools for Extreme Heat and Stormwater Flood Mitigation in the Dallas Metro Area". This event will be held virtually, via Microsoft Teams, on Wednesday, November 19, 2025, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Speakers from the Smart Surfaces Coalition will cover an overview of what smart surfaces are and the Cities for Smart Surfaces Program. Local governments can take advantage of these free tools and programs available to them to assess the performance of current surface infrastructure and model projected benefits of Smart Surface strategies.

The Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC) is a nonprofit organization that works with 40 leading national and international organizations to help cities address extreme heat and flooding through the rapid adoption of reflective, permeable, and green surfaces. These “Smart” Surfaces include reflective roofs and pavements, permeable paved surfaces, green stormwater infrastructure, tree canopy, and more. Through its Cities for Smart Surfaces program, SSC is partnering with the City of Dallas and the surrounding metropolitan area to provide technical assistance, resources, and specialized tools to help communities identify vulnerable neighborhoods, understand resilience opportunities, and model the impacts of deploying Smart Surfaces.

SSC will share three tools currently available for use in the Dallas metro area at no cost:

1. Decision Support Tool (DST) | The DST is a geospatial analysis tool designed to support Smart Surfaces policy and planning at the city and metro area levels. It contains data layers on existing surface infrastructure, health vulnerability statistics, socioeconomic data, race/ethnicity data, heat mapping, results from micrometeorological heat modeling of Smart Surfaces impact on air temperature, flooding vulnerability, and more. The tool features a query function designed to support planning and investment prioritization and to identify particularly vulnerable census tracts/neighborhoods within the city and metro area based on parameters chosen by the user. 
2. Benefit-Cost Analysis Tool (BCAT) | The BCAT quantifies the impacts of the adoption of Smart Surfaces at the metro area or city scale. After selecting which Smart Surfaces to implement across the selected region and timeframe, the user is presented with a report detailing the estimated financial impacts of their selected interventions (broken out by specific cost/benefit), the average temperature reduction for the area, the CO2-equivalent reduction, and the stormwater mitigation potential associated with the selected interventions. 
3. Smart Surfaces Policy Tracker (SSPT) | The SSPT is an easily searchable, centralized database of more than 2,000 Smart Surface policies in all 50 U.S. states. The tracker contains, for example, portions of zoning and building codes, procurement policies, comprehensive plans, green stormwater infrastructure regulations, and more. The tool also includes policy guidance resources and model policies developed by SSC and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.