The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database “will be retired,” a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events.
The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely.
The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters — spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms — since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public’s view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly.
The Trump administration has been laser-focused on killing programs and departments that are associated with “climate,” whether they are actually tracking global warming and its effects or not.
Some politicians and outside experts have asserted in the past that the database, which shows an increase in disaster losses over time, reflects mainly climate change-driven trends, though NOAA says on the website: “This product has no focus on climate event attribution.”
Population growth and the expansion of development in harms’ way are thought to be the dominant factors behind the long-term trend. However, the increasing occurrence and severity of some types of extreme weather events, due in part to human-caused climate change, is also amplifying some of these events and making them more costly, studies have shown.
The database vacuums loss information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and private sources.
According to the database, there were 403 weather and climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since 1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January.
Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023.
The billion-dollar disasters database is not easily replicable, such as by a nonprofit or private company, since it contained myriad non-public data shared with the government by private industry.
In addition, companies, including insurers, have their own tallies and methodologies that are typically closely guarded.
“What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, told CNN via email.
Porter said First Street works closely with the database.
“Without it, 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,” he told CNN.
Other data also has shown increases in natural disaster losses. For example, reinsurance company Swiss Re reported April 29 that global insured losses in 2025 are on course to reach $145 billion, with a 5% to 7% annual growth rate.
The disasters database is the latest casualty from firings, early retirements and incentive programs aimed at thinning the agency’s workforce along with the rest of the federal government. The National Weather Service has been hit particularly hard by staff reductions and has been cutting some of its services as a result.
The White House has published plans to make even deeper cuts to NOAA by eliminating its research division and closing its weather and climate labs, which would greatly reduce the data the agency collects and makes available to the public.
The administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 would cut NOAA’s spending by 24% compared to 2025.