“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
– George Orwell , 1984
The Trump administration this year stopped updating a federal database that tracked the cost of extreme weather and informed an annual list of hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage.
But the cost of such catastrophes continues to escalate at a record pace. That’s according to a revived version of the database released Wednesday by the nonprofit group Climate Central.
Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, it found. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year, the researchers found.
The tally comes as President Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. And there are signs that is already happening. The administration has created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November.
More than half of the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January, which nearly doubled the record for fire damage, adjusted for inflation, said Adam Smith, the senior climate impacts scientist at Climate Central.
Mr. Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years as a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist. He left the agency in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980.
He is continuing the work at Climate Central, using the same methodology — and plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data.
“This data set was simply too important to stop being updated,” Mr. Smith said.
A NOAA spokeswoman, Kim Doster, said the agency ”appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound, unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation.”
The information is used by the insurance industry, policymakers and researchers to understand and plan for a future in which — just as in the present — storms, floods, fires and other hazards are becoming more frequent, intense and damaging. The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 years, the data show.
- The U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database has a new home at Climate Central, with the latest available data through June 2025.
- Climate Central is restarting and sustaining this publicly accessible resource at a time when the frequency and costs of these devastating events have risen to unprecedented levels.
- The future of this database was uncertain after NOAA ceased operations of the project in May 2025.
- During the first six months of 2025, there have been 14 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the U.S., costing $101.4 billion.
- The Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025 were the costliest event so far this year as well as the costliest wildfire event on record — exceeding $60 billion, or about twice as much as the previous record.
- With 14 events already this year, 2025 is well above the long-term annual average of nine events per year.
Hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and other catastrophes may generate dramatic news coverage, but hail risk represents an increasingly common and costly threat to P&C insurers. Leveraging modern property intelligence to develop adaptive pricing models based on continuously evolving hail risk will prove crucial to insurers seeking to protect margins in regions that are especially vulnerable to this peril.
As it stands now, insurers in the United States receive more than 500,000 claims for hail-related property damage each year, mostly but no longer exclusively, between May and August. According to Experian, hail damage accounts for 45.5% of all homeowners claims nationwide, at an average cost of $11,695 per claim. It’s also the number one cause of roof damage claims. And it’s only getting worse.
In the 1990s, annual losses stemming from hailstorms averaged just over $1 billion. Today, they range between $8 and $15 billion per year. In 2021, a single hailstorm spanning Texas and Oklahoma inflicted more than $3.3 billion in damage. What’s more, rising global temperatures are causing hailstorms to grow more violent while hailstones grow ever larger. Communities in Texas, Colorado, and Alabama have set new records for the size of hailstones over just the past 48 months.