Researchers to revive disaster-tracking tool
NEW YORK: A climate nonprofit is planning to revive a key federal database tracking billion-dollar weather disasters that the Trump administration formally stopped updating in May.
The database, which was produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is set to return this fall as a product of Climate Central.
The organisation has hired Adam Smith, the former NOAA climatologist who led the disaster tracker for more than a decade, to continue tallying the growing number of storms, droughts and wildfires that cause at least US$1bil in damage.
In an interview with Bloomberg Green, Smith said he left NOAA voluntarily in April after facing pressure to stop work on the database.
The Trump administration has waged a broad assault on climate science in recent months, attacking mainstream findings, disabling the federal Climate.gov website and proposing to eliminate most of NOAA's research division.
The billion-dollar disaster tool, which has been retired but is still publicly accessible online, captured the financial toll wrought by increasingly intense weather events.
Damage estimates compiled by Smith and his team were a key element of the most recent National Climate Assessment.
They've also been used by the insurance and re-insurance sectors to highlight the risk weather hazards pose across the United States.
Rather than just a static dataset or periodic report, like those published by insurance businesses, the NOAA tool provided an interactive way to parse disaster losses by state, year and weather threat, Smith said.
'You could just slice and dice the data in different ways, depending on what question you're trying to answer,' Smith said in an interview. 'I've had many people try to ask me for guidance about how to recreate this, and I'm telling all these people, 'Hey, we're doing it'.'
NOAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smith's NOAA team found that the United States had experienced an annual average of nine extreme weather events that inflicted at least US$1bil in damage since 1980, when the analysis began.
But that number has spiked in recent years as development expands in disaster-prone regions. In 2023, the United States experienced a record US$28bil disasters, including a widespread drought that inflicted US$14.8bil in damages, and the deadly Maui wildfires. There were 27 such incidents in 2024.
Research published by the federal government found that climate change-fuelled extreme weather is already causing US$150bil in losses a year in the United States, and the risks are likely to rise as the planet warms.
Looking ahead, Smith said he hopes to compile and analyse data on disasters with far smaller price tags down to the US$100mil threshold. — Bloomberg
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