The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that it will no longer update the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database. A NOAA spokesperson said the change was “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes” of the Trump administration.
The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which is maintained by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, has tracked weather-related disasters since 1980 and provides crucial insights into the economic impacts of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other events. NOAA said that all data from 1980 to 2024 will be archived.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections, called the database “the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,” adding that the decision to stop maintaining it is “a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses.”