Group That Revived U.S. Weather Databases Says Costs of Disasters Are at a Record Pace.今年上半年，全美氣候災損創紀錄飆升

Samedi 1 Novembre 2025 

The Trump administration this year stopped updating a federal database that tracked (to be examining marks or pieces of information that show where a person or animal has gone, in order to catch him, her, or it追蹤)the cost of extreme weather and informed an annual list of hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage.

But the cost of such catastrophes continues to escalate(/ˈes.kə.leɪt/ to become or make something become greater or more serious（使）增強；（使）擴大；（使）加劇；（使）惡化) at a record pace. That’s according to a revived version of the database released by the nonprofit group Climate Central.

Through the first six months of this year, disasters across the United States caused more than $100 billion in damage, the most expensive start to any year on record, it found. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of the year, the researchers found.

The tally(a record or count of a number of things計數；記錄；比分) comes as President Donald Trump has said he wants to eventually shift the burden of the disaster relief and recovery from the federal government onto states. The administration had created a panel that is expected to recommend changes to the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates by the end of November.

More than half the costs from extreme weather so far this year stem(a central part of something from which other parts can develop or grow, or which forms a support) from the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January, which nearly doubled the record for fire damage, adjusted for inflation, said Adam Smith, the senior climate impacts scientist at Climate Central.

Smith led management of the federal database for 15 years as a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He left the agency in May, shortly after the Trump administration said it would stop reporting disaster damage costs. The government had maintained that database since the 1990s, with data going back to 1980.

He is continuing the work at Climate Central –and plans to eventually gather even more detailed disaster data.

‘’This dataset(a collection of separate sets of information that is treated as a single unit by a computer資料集) was simply too important to stop being updated,” Smith said.

A NOAA spokesperson, Kim Doster, said the agency “appreciates” that the database found “a funding mechanism other than the taxpayer dime” as NOAA focuses on “sound(showing or based on good judgment合理的，明智的;可靠的), unbiased research over projects based in uncertainty and speculation(the activity of guessing possible answers to a question without having enough information to be certain

猜測;推測，推斷).”

The information is used by the insurance industry, policymakers and researchers to understand and plan for a future in which storms, floods, fires and other hazards are becoming more frequent, intense and damaging.

The average number of billion-dollar disasters has surged from three per year during the 1980s to 19 annually during the last 10 year, the data show.

(Scott Dance)