Ag Weather Forum

The U.S. government ended its support of billion-dollar weather and climate disaster tracking by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) earlier this year. However, those extreme events continue to occur, and analysis of the cost of these events by the insurance industry offers some perspective on what has happened so far this year.

For the first half of 2025, insurance broker Gallagher Re, based in London in the United Kingdom, finds that the U.S. was hit with 15 billion-dollar weather disasters during the first six months of the year, from January through June. Total damages are estimated at $99 billion. The number of billion-dollar events for the first six months of the year is down from the record 23 events in 2024, but is on the average of the past 10 years. The Gallagher Re analysis was summarized by Meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Yale Climate Connection.

The events catalogued for January-June include 12 severe storm events, two wildfires and a drought episode. For the year to date, the losses from severe thunderstorms in the U.S. total $33 billion. That is the fourth highest on record, behind only 2024 ($62 billion), 2023 ($61 billion) and 2011 ($50 billion). There were two other severe storm events which are likely to hit the billion-dollar threshold when final figures are available.

Wildfire damage, which occurred in the Los Angeles area in January, has the largest total. Gallagher Re finds that the total economic damages of the two California wildfires -- the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire -- was $65 billion. That sum is the costliest fire event and the eighth-costliest weather disaster in world history, according to combined analysis from NOAA (1980-2024) and Gallagher Re (2025).

For the years that NOAA catalogued extreme weather and climate events with the billion-dollar damage benchmark, 403 such events were noted between 1980 and 2024. The total damage from those events exceeded $2.9 trillion. In that 44-year period, 115 such events -- 29% -- occurred during the five years from 2020 to 2024.

Continued tracking of extreme weather event occurrence and cost may depend on private firms' willingness to share at least portions of their in-house findings with the public. Meanwhile, the nonprofit organization Climate Central announced this week that it plans to revive the NOAA billion-dollar weather disaster database. This would offer a useful additional perspective if this effort is successful.

The full Yale Climate Connection summary of extreme events in 2025 is available here: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/….

Bryce Anderson can be reached at bryce.anderson@dtn.com

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