“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 group announced on Wednesday.
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Extreme weather events in the first half of the year, including wildfires and severe storms, cost the US more than $100 billion, according to Climate Central.
The non-profit organization, which analyzes and reports on climate science, announced Wednesday that it has taken over the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset. For decades, the dataset was run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but US President Donald Trump abruptly axed it in May.
The database tracks the cost of climate change-fueled weather disasters such as floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, providing critical information to help first responders, the insurance industry, and researchers with their planning, recovery operations, and weather assessments.
“[T]his dataset was simply too important to stop being updated,” said Adam Smith, Climate Central’s Senior Climate Impacts Scientist.
“We’ve seen a widespread demand for its revival from many aspects of society and industry, including the private sector, academia, local community decision makers, even Congress,” Smith, who once managed the dataset at NOAA, added.
14 Billion-Dollar Events in First Half of 2025
The latest update shows that between January and June, a total of 14 extreme weather events each racked up billions of dollars in damages in the US. Together, they led to losses of $101.4 billion.
The US’s costliest disaster in the first half of the year were the LA wildfires in January. Damages exceeded $60 billion, a record-breaking amount for a wildfire and almost twice as much as the previous record. Researchers found that the hot, dry, and windy conditions that fuelled the LA fires were made about 35% more likely due to human-made warming.
The remaining billion-dollar disasters were severe storms and tornadoes, several of which had impacts produced from flooding, Climate Central said.
The non-profit added that four potential billion-dollar events, including Early-May Southeastern and Southern severe storms and flooding, are still being assessed.
More Frequent and Intense
Climate change is directly linked to more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.
Since records began in 1980, the US has seen 417 billion-dollar disasters, with total costs exceeding $3.1 trillion. Such events have occurred nearly twice as often compared to the 30-year average (adjusted for inflation), racking up $1.5 trillion in losses.
The costliest year for the US in terms of climate and weather disasters was 2017, with $405.2 billion in losses, followed by 2005 ($275.5 billion), 2024 ($187.9 billion) and 2022 ($187.6 billion).
The costliest event in the Climate Central database is the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, which cost $206.3 billion and killed 1,833 people. Also in the top-5 are Hurricane Harvey in 2017 (163.8 billion), Hurricane Ian in 2022 ($121.9 billion), Hurricane Maria in 2017 ($117.8 billion), and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 ($91.1 billion).
Hurricanes – also known as typhoons in the northwestern Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific – are a rather common, natural weather phenomenon, though there has been a significant increase in their intensity in recent decades, which scientific observations link to increased ocean temperatures. While the number of hurricanes is not necessarily increasing, those that do form are becoming more destructive – generating heavier rain and a higher storm surge.
Featured image: CAL FIRE_Official/Flickr.
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