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NOAA will stop updating database tracking costliest weather disasters

Residents and volunteers clean up on Oct. 1, 2024, after the French Broad River flooded downtown Marshall, North Carolina. The remnants of Hurricane Helene caused widespread flooding, downed trees and power outages in western North Carolina. (Travis Long/The News & Observer/TNS)
By Scott Dance Washington Post

Federal scientists will no longer update a list of weather disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday. The list had been growing dramatically in recent years, a sign of extreme weather and increasing development across the country.

It is on a growing list of scientific datasets that NOAA says scientists will no longer update or that the administration will decommission entirely. The agency said the existing disaster records, stretching from 1980 through 2024, will remain accessible.

Without updates to the database, it could become harder for the country to assess the ways climate change, building patterns and population trends are exposing Americans to weather hazards. The numbers of billion-dollar disasters have surged from just a handful per year in the 1980s to an average of 23 per year from 2020 through 2024.

Some point to that surge as a signal of human-caused climate change, as fossil fuel emissions and the greenhouse effect have caused average global temperatures to rise close to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution. The Trump administration has taken steps to downplay and undercut climate science, including cuts to climate initiatives it said incited anxiety in children and proposals to eliminate an entire wing of NOAA devoted to Earth science and climate research, and Democrats said the decision to discontinue the database was the latest erosion of science.

“This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” said Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Ill., who worked as a broadcast meteorologist before joining Congress.

But while global warming is indeed energizing more intense storms, much of the surge in billion-dollar disaster events is actually a sign of migration into disaster-prone areas, according to a Washington Post analysis of the database.

Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said tracking disaster costs is essential but added that there are better approaches than the one NOAA has since taken. As a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Pielke studied the database and said he found inconsistencies in how loss estimates were calculated or inflation was factored in over the nearly five decades of disasters the agency tracked.

“It’s absolutely important for the federal government to track the cost of disasters; there’s no doubt about that,” Pielke said. “Perhaps this is an opportunity to do things right.”

On the NOAA website where it typically shares updates on billion-dollar disasters, the agency says none have occurred in the United States this year through April 8.

But early estimates by scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information, which maintains the database, suggest there have been six to eight billion-dollar disasters so far this year.

That includes the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January and were the costliest disaster in U.S. history, destroying as much as $150 billion worth of property and infrastructure. Storms, tornado outbreaks and floods that have swept across the middle of the country this year also caused significant damage.

Severe thunderstorms have become the costliest type of weather disaster, with hail and strong winds causing damage across areas that were once more rural but are now home to significantly larger populations. They accounted for about three-quarters of a record 28 billion-dollar disasters that hit the U.S. in 2023.

Asked about the reasoning behind the decision to no longer update the billion-dollar disaster database, NOAA spokeswoman Kim Doster said in an email it was because of “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.”

Scientists who worked on the database are among hundreds from NOAA who have been fired or have taken buyouts as the Trump administration and its U.S. DOGE Service seek to shrink the federal government. The many recent departures at the agency include Adam Smith, who led the billion-dollar disaster program for 15 years before leaving last week.

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Brady Dennis contributed to this report.