In a move that has sparked concern among climate scientists and policy makers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—a key player in climate monitoring and disaster assessment—will halt its work on tracking the economic fallout from extreme weather events, a decision mirrored by the Trump administration's broader retreat from climate change resources. According to a report by NBC Miami, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information will archive its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database by 2024, a dataset that has historically provided crucial information on the financial impacts of the nation's climate catastrophes since 1980.
The agency, functioning under the Department of Commerce and responsible for daily forecasts and severe storm warnings, has tracked a myriad of significant events such as hurricanes and wildfires, amounting to trillions in damage and the tracking has been unique in its ability to fuse data from myriad sources, like FEMA's assistance records and insurance company reports which gave a fuller picture of each incident's financial strain, NOAA’s Communications Director Kim Doster expressed that the strategic change was due to evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, as reported by NBC Miami. Scientists have repeatedly confirmed that climate-shifted weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, raising the stakes for communities and industries like insurance, seeing these changes not merely as budgetary adjustments but as a myopic move in a time when transparency and data are critical.
In a similar vein, a report by ABC News highlighted that this NOAA database had been considered the "gold standard" for assessing extreme weather costs, with meteorologist Jeff Masters for Yale Climate Connections telling the publication that its loss is "a major loss, since it comes at a time when we need to better understand how much climate change is increasing disaster losses." The absence of this database leaves a gap that may not be easily filled by insurance brokers and international databases, which, while useful, don't provide the comprehensive, nonpublic data NOAA had access to.
The truncation of NOAA's climate data tracking arrives amid a series of dismissals within the agency orchestrated by the Trump administration aimed at reducing the federal workforce and its operations, in February hundreds of NOAA employees were let go, followed by over a thousand more in March as part of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency plan—a decision criticized by experts who worried about its implications on life-saving weather forecasts and economic stability and NOAA even suspended translating its products for a brief period, resuming the service several weeks later. Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at the nonprofit Climate Central, told ABC News that “All of these changes will make Americans less safe in the face of climate change,” emphasizing the urgency to recognize and act upon the visible and destructive manifestations of climate change in people's lives.
