Los Angeles County firefighters attempt to put out a fire at a Bank of America as the Eaton Fire, which destroyed many homes and businesses, moves through Altadena, California on Jan. 8, 2025. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — which has been experiencing massive staff layoffs and funding cuts by the Trump administration — has announced it will stop tracking the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters, including heat waves, floods and wildfires.
The agency said updates will no longer be made to its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and that this information — which stretches back 45 years — would be archived, reported The Associated Press.
“This administration thinks that if they stop doing the work to identify climate change that climate change will go away,” said Democratic Representative from Illinois Eric Sorensen, who was a broadcast meteorologist before being elected to Congress, as The Washington Post reported.
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On its website, NOAA said there have been no billion-dollar disasters through April 8 of 2025. However, NCEI scientists, who maintain the database, suggest that six to eight have already occurred this year.
These include the deadly wildfires that decimated parts of Los Angeles at the start of the year. The wildfires destroyed approximately $150 billion in property and infrastructure and were the most costly disaster in United States history.
Powerful storms — including tornadoes — and floods have also caused significant damage in the U.S. this year. The most costly type of weather disaster are severe thunderstorms, which pack damaging strong winds and hail. They were responsible for roughly 75 percent of the record 28 billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. in 2023.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster said the decision to stop updating the billion-dollar disaster database was due to “evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes,” reported The Washington Post.
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For decades, NOAA has tracked hundreds of weather events across the country that have added up to trillions in damage, The Associated Press reported.
In order to estimate the total losses from individual disasters, the database uses information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), state agencies and insurance organizations, among other sources.
Jeremy Porter, co-founder of First Street, a financial modeling firm that assesses climate risk, told CNN that, without NOAA’s billion-dollar disasters database, “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.”
“What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers,” Porter explained.
Private databases would be comparatively limited in scope and not likely to be as widely shared for proprietary reasons, reported The Associated Press.
“[T]he NOAA database is the gold standard we use to evaluate the costs of extreme weather,” said Jeff Masters, a Yale Climate Connections meteorologist, who pointed to the international disaster database and substitutes from insurance brokers as alternative information sources.
Experts have attributed the increasing intensity of extreme weather events, including Hurricane Milton, the wildfires in southern California and scorching temperatures to the climate crisis.
Kristina Dahl, nonprofit Climate Central’s vice president of science, said the actions don’t “change the face that these disasters are escalating year over year.”
“Extreme weather events that cause a lot of damage are one of the primary ways that the public sees that climate change is happening and is affecting people,” Dahl said. “It’s critical that we highlight those events when they’re happening. All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change.”
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