Before Hurricane Helene, Tropical Storm Debby prompted a state of emergency in North Carolina last year, bringing heavy rainfall and leaving more than 11,000 Duke Energy customers in the Triad without power.
Tracking the impacts of such events has, in part, on federal resources like NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database — which is now scheduled to stop receiving updates after 2024.
“This is part of a disturbing pattern. Public information sources that provide objective information for analysts are being shut down,†said Stan Meiburg, executive director of Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University.
Loss of NOAA data hampers local climate resilience planning
People are also reading…
The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, , has tracked the economic impacts of extreme weather events, including property damage and costs from hurricanes, floods, wildfires and more, nationwide.
With its retirement, the database will cease updates beyond the calendar year 2024. While the data collected in the archive to date will remain accessible, no new information will be added moving forward.
Without access to the kind of information city and regional planners rely on to make key decisions about future infrastructure, Meiburg noted, it will become more difficult for them to anticipate needs and secure support for projects that could reduce the damage from future extreme weather events.
“Hurricane Helene is an obvious case in point,†he wrote in an email.
North Carolina has experienced increasingly frequent and severe weather events in recent years — trends that align with global climate patterns, according to state climatologists and meteorologists including UNC professor Charles Konrad and Corey Davis of the North Carolina State Climate Office.
Last year’s Hurricane Helene became the deadliest U.S. hurricane since Katrina in 2005 and the fourth deadliest to make landfall on the mainland since 1950, bringing catastrophic flooding to the western North Carolina.
“In the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, there’s been more frequent weather events — some of that is natural variability, and some of it is climate change,†Konrad said.
With hurricane season approaching, Konrad added that the greatest concern is the ongoing cuts to agencies that monitor climate and weather — such as the recent reductions at NOAA, which is the parent agency of the National Weather Service (NWS), the division responsible for issuing forecasts, storm warnings, and real-time weather data across the country.
“There’s a big fear that the skillfulness of weather forecasts may be not as great with this during this hurricane season.â€
Insurance rates likely to rise amid data gaps
While state and local emergency response organizations can estimate damages from previous events, Meiburg pointed out that without a centralized national database, it would be “virtually impossible†to collect and consolidate this data across the country with proper quality control.
“Insurance rates are increasing in North Carolina as insurance companies try to anticipate the risks of future extreme weather events made more likely by climate change,†Meiburg wrote in an email.
“Without accurate estimates of past damages, insurance companies will (understandably) ask for rate increases that reflect worst-case scenarios. Without accurate information, insurance regulators will be hard-pressed to refute these requests.â€
Following Hurricane Helene, the North Carolina Rate Bureau (NCRB) a statewide average increase of 42% in homeowners’ insurance premiums, with a specific request for a 20.5% hike in 11 western counties, including areas like Asheville’s Buncombe County that were heavily affected by Helene.
The North Carolina Department of Insurance negotiated these proposed increases down to an average of 7.5% annually over the next two years, totaling approximately a 15% increase by mid-2026 instead.
