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—is set to return this fall as a product of Climate Central. The organization 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 $1 billion 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 US. 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 US had experienced an annual average of nine extreme weather events that inflicted at least $1 billion 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 US experienced a record 28 billion-dollar disasters, including a widespread drought that inflicted $14.8 billion in damages, and the deadly Maui wildfires. There were 27 such incidents in 2024.
Research published by the federal government found that climate change-fueled extreme weather is already causing $150 billion in losses a year in the US, and the risks are likely to rise as the planet warms.
The end of NOAA’s disaster loss research had sparked concern across the insurance industry, said Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. While companies had other avenues to collect damage estimates, Nutter said, “the real value of the tool is the public awareness about the impact that extreme weather is having on both insured and economic losses.”
Looking ahead, Smith said he hopes to compile and analyze data on disasters with far smaller price tags down to the $100 million threshold. These include severe hail storms in the US Midwest and Mountain West, which are a growing concern for the insurance sector. While NOAA typically reported wildfire damages seasonally across an entire region, Climate Central will also work to calculate losses from individual blazes, something Smith said would make the data “more transparent and more granular.”
The nonprofit has published studies and tools that demonstrate how human-caused climate change is influencing both daily temperatures and extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. Smith said “economic attribution,” which would attempt to measure climate change-driven losses for specific disasters, is “something worth exploring.”
Top photo: A worker with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) holds buckets of burned lithium-ion batteries removed from a burned electric vehicle (EV) after the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, California, on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025.
Copyright 2025 Bloomberg.
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