The first half of this year was the costliest weather and climate disaster ever recorded in the United States, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonprofit Climate Central.
It's information the public might never have known: This spring, the Trump administration shut down a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that tracked the weather. events that generated at least $1 billion to the detriment. The researcher who led this work, Adam Smith, left NOAA because of this decision.
Climate Central, a research group focusing on the effects of climate change, hired Smith to reconstruct the database, which includes records going back to 1980.
Damage from 14 weather events exceeded $1 billion in the first six months of 2025, according to a new analysis from the organization. January's Los Angeles wildfires were by far the year's costliest natural disaster, causing more than $61 billion in damage. This also makes them the most expensive wildfire event on record.
The results show how the cost of weather and climate disasters continues to rise as extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, and as populations move into areas susceptible to costly destruction from wildfires and floods.
The report itself is also an example of how nonprofit groups are increasingly taking over federal projects that once tracked and quantified the effects of climate change as the Trump administration rolls back climate science. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “scam.”” His administration has cut funding for clean energy projects and is trying to deprive the Environmental Protection Agency ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution it causes global warming.
Jennifer Brady, a senior data analyst and research manager at Climate Central who worked on the project, said the closure of NOAA's billion-dollar disaster database upset the nonprofit's staff, who decided to take matters into their own hands.
“This has always been one of our favorite datasets. It tells so many different stories. It tells the story of climate change. It tells the story of where people live and how they live at risk,” Brady said. “We're glad to have him back.”
Kim Doster, a NOAA spokesman, said the agency “estimates that the disastrous billion-dollar product has found a funding mechanism other than taxpayer dimes.”
“NOAA will continue to refocus its resources on products that are consistent with the President's executive order to restore the gold standard of science by prioritizing reliable and unbiased research,” Doster said in an email.
The database was a politically polarizing project. House Republicans in 2024 complained to the NOAA administrator about the program, saying concerns over what they called “false data.” Last month Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would require NOAA to publish the dataset. and update it twice a year to say lawmakers used the reports to inform disaster funding decisions. But the bill remains in committee, with little chance of passage in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Last month, a Trump administration official told NBC News that NOAA had abandoned the database project due to uncertainty about how it estimates damage from natural disasters. The official said the project costs about $300,000 a year, that it requires a significant number of man hours and that the data “does not serve decision-making purposes and remains purely informational at best.”
“This data is often used to promote the idea that climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, more extreme and more costly, without taking into account other factors such as increased development in floodplains or other weather-prone areas, or the cyclical nature of climate in different regions,” the official said at the time.
Brady, however, said the database has always recognized population changes and climate variability as important factors influencing the cost of natural disasters.
Climate Central's work uses the same methodology and data sources as the NOAA database, she said. These sources include, but are not limited to, National Flood Insurance Program claims, NOAA storm data, and private property insurance data.
The analysis reflects the “direct costs” of natural disasters, such as damage to buildings, infrastructure and crops. It does not take into account other factors, including loss of life, health damage from natural disasters, or economic losses of “natural capital” such as forests or wetlands. Data are adjusted for inflation.
A new analysis of the first half of 2025 shows it could be one of the costliest years on record, even though no hurricanes made landfall in the continental United States.
Last year, NOAA calculated Disasters costing $27 billionand costs were approximately $182.7 billion. This is the second-highest number of billion-dollar disasters in the report's history, after 2023.
Climate Central isn't the only group trying to recreate the work the federal government used to do as the Trump administration rolls back climate science.
A group of employees laid off from NOAA have returned to work. climate.USAnon-profit successor Climate.gova federal website that once provided data and analysis to explain climate issues to the broader public. The site went down this summer.
Rebecca Lindsay, editing Climate.gov Before she was fired in February, she and other NOAA employees who co-founded the nonprofit raised about $160,000. They plan to hold Climate.gov archives on the new website and will begin publishing new articles on climate change in the next few weeks.
“We're rescuing this information and making sure that when people need answers about what's happening with the climate, they can find them,” Lindsey said.
The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society also announced plans publish a special collection of studies on climate changeAfter the Trump administration told scientists volunteering to work on the National Climate Assessment—a comprehensive synthesis of research on climate change and its impacts in the U.S.—they were no longer needed.
The administration fired staff at the American Global Change Research Program, which organized the National Climate Assessment and coordinated climate research programs at various federal agencies.
Walter Robinson, commissioner of publications for the American Meteorological Society, said the National Climate Assessment was “effectively canceled” by the administration's decisions, which he viewed as a “abrogation” of the federal government's responsibility.
The new collection cannot replace assessment, he added, but its goal is to gather in one place the latest science on the effects of climate change in the United States. rthe study will be published in several scientific journals on a sliding basis.
“People are pitching in,” Robinson said of his group’s efforts. “As scientists, we do the best we can.”
