NOAA Says It Will Stop Tracking Financial Impact of Extreme Weather, Climate Events

The agency said the change is ‘in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.’

The logo of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla., on Aug. 29, 2019. Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Thursday that it is decommissioning multiple databases and will stop collecting data regarding the financial impact of extreme weather and climate events.

NOAA operates under the Department of Commerce and is tasked with daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring.

The agency announced the decision via multiple “notice of changes” published on its official website.

NOAA said its National Centers for Environmental Information will be “retiring” its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster product, which has for decades tracked the cost of weather disasters, including floods, heat waves, and wildfires across the country.

The database uniquely pulls information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s assistance data, insurance organizations, state agencies, and others to estimate overall losses from individual disasters.

According to the database, there were 403 “weather and climate disasters” in the United States from 1980 to 2024 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2024).

The total cost of these 403 events exceeds $2.915 trillion, according to NOAA.

NOAA said there will be no updates to the product beyond calendar year 2024. All past reports spanning as far back as 1980 and their underlying data will be archived, it said.

The agency did not state why it was retiring the product in its notice.

NOAA’s communications director, Kim Doster, said in a statement that the change was “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) condemned the move in a statement on the social media platform Bluesky.

“There were 27 billion-dollar extreme weather and climate disasters in 2024. Now we have no way to track them,” the lawmaker wrote. “This is anti-science, anti-safety, and anti-American.”

Trump Admin Seeks NOAA Budget Cuts

The announcement comes just days after the Trump administration published its preliminary budget request for discretionary spending for fiscal year 2026, in which it proposed slashing NOAA’s annual budget by around $1.5 billion.

According to the request, the administration plans to terminate a number of climate-related research, data, and grant programs at NOAA, which it said are “not aligned” with its policy-ending “Green New Deal” initiatives.

The budget cited examples such as NOAA’s educational grant programs, which the administration said have “consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets and spread environmental alarm,” and its funding of organizations such as the Ocean Conservancy and One Cool Earth that the adminsitration said have “pushed agendas harmful to America’s fishing industries.”

The administration said its budget proposal also “rescopes” NOAA’s Geostationary and Extended Observations satellite program to achieve nearly $8 billion in savings and cancels contracts for instruments “designed primarily for unnecessary climate measurements rather than weather observations.”

NOAA’s announcement also comes just months after the federal government fired hundreds of federal employees at the agency; a move the White House said was aimed at ensuring that “mission-critical functions to fulfill the NOAA’s statutory responsibilities weren’t compromised.”

Another round of more than 1,000 job cuts was initiated in March.

In a separate notice on Thursday, NOAA said it is also decommissioning its International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project H-Series CDR, which has provided data on various aspects of cloud variables such as cloud amount, optical thickness, and cloud top temperature since 1983.

The agency said the database will no longer be updated but that the data will remain accessible via an archive.

Additionally, NOAA is decommissioning its HURricane SATellite Data - Advanced Dvorak Technique, it said.

According to NOAA, the HURSAT project “provides Tropical Cyclone-centric satellite data in gridded netCDF format to create a database of small, portable, and easy to work with storm data.”

“NCEI’s ADT-HURSAT has been irregularly updated historically,” the agency said in its announcement. “A recent update extended the record from 1981-2017 to 1981-2024, but the product will not be updated beyond that point.”

NOAA added that the 1981–2024 data will be preserved and remain available online.

The Epoch Times has contacted NOAA for further comment.