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Title: NOAA Retires Extreme Weather Database

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/08/20325...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known "billion-dollar
weather and climate disasters" database "will be retired," a move that will
make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme
weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also
ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to
staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides,
with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely. The disasters
database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has
allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural
disasters -- spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms -- since
1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the
public's view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around
them and making extreme weather more costly. [...] The database vacuums loss
information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and
private sources. According to the database, there were 403 weather and
climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since
1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been
any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four
events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-
area wildfires in January. Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such
disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual
average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023.
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized
methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and
non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized
government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise
inaccessible to most researchers," Jeremy Porter, head of climate
implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial
modeling firm, told CNN via email. "Without it, replicating or extending
damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types,
is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to
commercial catastrophe models."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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