White House budget cuts force NOAA to trim vital climate services and resources

The United States will no longer be tracking major natural disasters following new cuts from the Trump administration.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a wave a services and databases to be decommissioned Thursday morning, stemming from the latest initiative by the Trump administration to cut any programs and departments associated in any way with “climate.”

One of them is the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which contains a ton of information about some of the major storms and weather events that have hit the country over the years.

This database has tracked the cost of major natural disasters since 1980, and of the $403 billion disasters across the country since 1980, 86 have been here in Iowa. Averaging about two per year, but that number has grown to around four to five per year based on the last decade.

While the database is being discontinued, it will be accessible through the National Centers for Environmental Information archives, but will no longer be updated beyond 2024.

What makes it so valuable is that it collects data from things like government reports, private claims, and insurance loss estimates that would otherwise be proprietary information, making it nearly impossible for researchers and the general public to access. While many private companies like insurers have their own numbers, they aren’t publicly available.

Without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models, conducting damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, will be nearly impossible.

This shutdown is part of 30 other databases on the chopping block, such as Gridded Climate Data, the Ocean Buoy Database, which is used to determine hurricane strength ahead of landfall, U.S. Earthquake Data, Coastline Resources, and so much more that is vital to forecasters and researchers that keep us safe every day.

All of this is the latest casualty aimed at thinning NOAA’s workforce. The White House recently announced plans to continue defunding NOAA by eliminating its research division and shutting down weather and climate labs, reducing the kind of data NOAA collects and makes accessible to the public.