This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Last year, 27 “billion-dollar” storms rocked the United States.
Thanks to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s disaster tracking database, we know catastrophes are getting more expensive overall. NOAA’s data also makes clear that more natural disasters are crossing the ten-figure threshold in terms of damage and cleanup costs.
But this data will soon go away. The Trump administration announced late last week that it will no longer update the database.
While the elimination of this essential resource feels politically motivated, its economic value was clear-cut, according to many elected officials and experts in industries ranging from real estate to insurance to construction. Often, it helped cities and companies assess risk with reliable, publicly accessible and unbiased data.
NOAA created the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database in 1980 to track storms, floods, and other catastrophes that caused at least that much in damage. Such events are rare but account for more than 80% of the nation’s weather- and climate-related damages. In the 45 years since its launch, the database amassed 403 entries, with data showing those storms levied more than $3 trillion in damages (adjusted for inflation).
NOAA did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
By scrupulously recording this data, NOAA could spot trends, including steep increases in the cost and frequency of disasters from one year – or one decade – to the next. Insurance companies, state and local governments, researchers, and the public used this information to track climate risk over time. The data helped these stakeholders plan for the future.
Much of this record-keeping occurred at the National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI. The agency and its trove of climate data happen to sit in Asheville, N.C.
The city is just one of many across six states that saw the blunt end of Hurricane Helene, the storm walloped the southeast in September and caused $78.7 billion in damages, according to NOAA’s data. Western North Carolina, the data shows, suffered one of the highest disaster costs per million residents last year.
Local and state authorities gather their own data on disaster costs, but it's often piecemeal.
Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder said local preliminary calculations peg the losses from Helene at nearly $80 million.
“We would all do our own [cost estimates] but NOAA has that bigger picture,” Pinder said.
Local governments rely on consultants and engineers to track disaster costs, but officials in Asheville told Grist that resilience measures – those meant to protect residents from future disasters – are highly dependent on federal projections.
For instance, in 2021, the city used NOAA data to make the case for major reconstruction of the dam at North Fork Reservoir, which provides 70% of Buncombe County’s drinking water. That work, completed in 2021, is believed to have kept the dam from failing during the flooding that followed Helene.
“Losing that broader national benchmark will likely make it harder to illustrate the growing scale of disasters and the importance of proactive investments like this,” Jessica Hughes, a city of Asheville communications officer, said.
This comes as the region’s awareness of its climate risk experiences a seismic shift.
“After Hurricane Helene – which occurred in an area that had once been hailed as a climate haven in Western North Carolina, all the way up in the mountains – we now know that climate havens don't really exist,” said Carly Fabian, a senior insurance policy advocate at consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen.
According to Asheville realtor Hadley Cropp, people do deep research before deciding where to move. Helene called into question the idea of a “climate haven,” leading homebuyers to begin asking new questions and seeking detailed climate data before deciding whether and where to buy.
“Helene has kind of shifted the landscape a little bit,” Cropp said. “Floodplains have been expanded and redesigned, and so people before Helene never even really asked about that kind of thing unless it was specifically in an obvious floodplain.”
Although insurance companies rely on several datasets to set rates, NOAA’s information was widely trusted, said Jason Tyson, spokesman for North Carolina’s Department of Insurance. “Because it's coming from the government, it's not encumbered by the rival databases that might have some sort of agenda,” he said. Another insurance expert, David Marlett at Appalachian state University, told BPR that insurance's response to climate change is just pragmatic.
“Whether people believe in climate change or politically they want to accept it or not, the insurance companies do and they're responding accordingly,” Marlett said.
The database – while an important source of research for climate policy advocates – aimed to quantify disasters in terms of dollars and cents, not as a statement on environmental politics.
In the 1980s, the U.S. experienced a little over three billion-dollar disasters a year. That tally skyrocketed to 23 annually between 2020 and 2024
“It is definitely not a plot of climate-change-increased disasters over time,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It's a plot of increased disaster losses for a variety of reasons that includes climate change, but it's certainly not limited to it, and maybe isn't even the primary driver in many cases.”
For example, more people have been settling where hurricanes make landfall along the Gulf Coast, and in the wildland-urban interfaces where housing developments abut forested areas. That’s putting more and more structures in harm’s way. The U.S. has also been getting richer, meaning larger homes filled with more stuff.
Still, researchers used the database to help them understand how billion-dollar disasters are becoming more common, and what role climate change plays in worsening hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and floods.
“It's surprisingly difficult to get high-quality, reliable estimates of the economic damages associated with events, and the health effects associated with events,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, a research and communication nonprofit.
“So it's a real loss there to the ability … to parse out the economic damages associated with climate change.”
NOAA was uniquely positioned to maintain such a database, as some of the information it ingested came from insurance companies.
“They don't necessarily want to disclose that to their competitors, but they were willing to disclose it to this non-partisan science agency,” Swain said.
It’s unlikely the private sector will be able to build a comparable dataset, Swain said.
“This is to the dismay and even alarm of many people, for example, in the insurance industry,” Swain said, “which would be the industry best suited to potentially develop an alternative.”
Losing the database will have ripple effects, Swain added, as so many use this information to determine where to rebuild after a disaster, where to regrow crops, and – for insurance companies – where to underwrite coverage.
“Really,” Swain said, “who doesn't need this information in some form starts to become maybe an easier question to answer.”
With or without the database, billion-dollar disasters will keep happening, and almost certainly with more frequency as the planet warms, says Dahl.
“Just because we stop reporting this information, doesn't mean that the disasters are stopping and that the damages are ending. It really just leaves us more in the dark as a nation.”
