Water Champion Chat:
Trent Ford

For those who don’t know, can you tell us about who you are and what you do?  

I’m the state climatologist for Illinois. Every state has a state climatologist—Illinois has had one since the 1970s. The role has evolved as water and climate and weather issues have evolved across the state of Illinois. 

My job is split into two parts. One part is as a climate researcher studying how the water system and the climate system interact, especially related to extremes: drought, heavy rain, flooding, and climate change impacts. The second part is outreach and engagement. That ranges from public speaking—including serving as an expert for panels like MPC’s Vision for Water panel last year—to media work, as well as being an expert for state agency engagement and local level municipality engagement.  

I’m based at the Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS), which is part of the Prairie Research Institute, which is housed at the University of Illinois—lots of umbrellas. ISWS is the go-to organization for water science issues in the state. 

Are there any ideas that stuck with you from MPC’s Vision for Water event? 

The breadth of the panel that that you mentioned was a really good example of how complicated and interwoven the water discipline is, just in the state of Illinois. When you mix in things like the climate and the supply of water, along with geology and geomorphology, the water chemistry, and the issues with pollutants with all of the human aspects of it—water use and growth and politics and policy—you can see just how complex things are.  

For me, it’s important to understand and communicate that complexity, especially when working with other scientists. As scientists, we’re trained to see things from a very myopic viewpoint. We do our science, our science is objective, then we throw it out into the ether to be used. And in reality, it’s just not always the case. It’s really helpful to have these kinds of events to remind us of there are other people working in vastly different aspects of water who we have to bring into these conversations. If I have a model that estimates how much rain we’re going to get by 2050 in Chicago—even if it’s perfectly accurate—that means absolutely nothing if I’m not talking to (or if that information is not usable for) folks who are talking about water policy. Same thing: the water policy needs to be grounded in science. We see examples of that gap all the time. 

Has your work changed or evolved since then? Are there any new focuses coming into view for you in 2025? 

The world looks a lot different. The last four years, we’ve been able to be in offensive mode. We’ve been able to turn down opportunities to write grants because there were so many opportunities, whether from federal or state level funding. We don’t know right now, but that may not be the case moving forward—at least for the next few years—if federal resources and priorities shift, as they have been.  

My focus, at least for the near future, is to work as hard as possible to hang on to what we have. We have colleagues at USDA who have been laid off already, and that kind of put us in scramble mode on projects and initiatives. Partnerships, the ability and resources to do research, trying to not lose any of the gains that have been made—that’s priority number one.  

Priority number two is producing climate information for different applications around the state. One ongoing initiative is focused on emergency management and planning across the state, making a future-looking climate toolkit that folks can use, based on the needs of that emergency management community. We’re having workshops around the state with emergency managers from the county and city level, to understand what their needs are. There’s other initiatives too, partnerships between Argonne and Discovery Partners Institute and others for better modeling of high impact events like hailstorms, and intense windstorms.  

As our climate shifts and becomes more variable, how have you been thinking about the use of data and technology in planning? 

In Kentucky they’re dealing with some really serious flooding along the whole Ohio Basin. That basin—from Cairo, Illinois, all the way up to Pittsburgh—was in pretty serious drought in the fall. We’ve seen this flip between drought and flood. When we’re doing climate assessments, it’s easier to smooth out the curves and talk about the change in the mean state, like how much precipitation we’re getting. For Illinois, if we look at precipitation projections, yeah, we’re getting wetter, but that variability means that local scale impacts may run counter to that narrative. It’s a message I’m trying to amplify: we don’t want to focus solely on the trend, even though that matters, but also on variability and what that means for actual impacts. 

We want to be able to model the changes in climate beyond just the change in the mean state—to understand variability and the ramifications of that at local scales. State-of-the art global climate models can model precipitation, helping us predict things like stormwater movement, or stream levels, lake levels, things like that that people are more concerned about when the rubber meets the road with water impacts. Especially within urban and developed areas—considering stormwater drainage and how infrastructure responds to changes in the variability of precipitation—the extremes are even more important to understand. 

That takes not only advances in climate modeling, but also a working partnership with entities that are developing these models. The advancements in the models—things like more advanced computing, maybe even quantum computing, and certainly artificial intelligence—can help improve predictability and get some of that finer scale data that we can’t get with a physics-based model. But I think even more important is understanding how climate model development can be done in unison with local scale applications of that climate information.  

What’s your Vision for Water for Chicago and Illinois?  

The overall vision is sustainable, healthy water supply for Chicago and the state of Illinois into the foreseeable future. Water is a resource and an asset that we have that some places don’t have or will not have. The governor’s administration has talked about this—water as a resource. But I think it goes far beyond just having enough water to put a big industry on the lakefront. It’s how we’re managing those water resources in the face of a changing climate. I’d love to see a more integrated approach to studying and managing water resources. That’s happening, but it’s fragmented in certain ways. I would like to see those connections become even stronger into the future, so that we can make the best use of the limited funding that we may have, especially in the next few years. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.