INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The Trump administration's steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several
climate-related programs Thursday.Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the "billion-dollar weather and climate
disasters" database for vague reasons
Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation's most devastating weather events, critically pooling
various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US
triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that's a conservative estimate
Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the
database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats
All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends."In alignment with evolving priorities,
Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product," NOAA announced
"All past reports, spanning 1980-2024, and their underlying data remain authoritative, archived, and available," NOAA said, but no data
would be gathered for 2025 or any year after.According to NCEI's FAQ, every state has experienced at least one billion-dollar disaster since
1980, while some states, like Texas, have been hit by more than 100
The Central, South, and Southeast regions of the US are most likely to be hurt most by the data loss, as those regions "typically experience
a higher frequency of billion-dollar disasters," the FAQ said.
