According to the NOAA, in 2023 (as of June 8), there have been 9 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States. These events included 1 flooding event, 7 severe storm events, and 1 winter storm event.
Overall, these events resulted in the deaths of 99 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted. The 1980–2022 annual average was 8.1 events (CPI-adjusted) annually, but the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2018–2022) has been over double that – 18.0 events (CPI-adjusted).
The past three years have had a combined 60 billion-dollar disasters, the most of any three-year period in NOAA records dating to 1980. That included 13 to 14 severe thunderstorm billion-dollar events each year from 2020 through 2022.
The top three costliest so far this year have been California’s Floods (from Christmas 2022 through March 2023) coming in at $3.5 Billion, the Severe Thunderstorms and Tornadoes that swept through the South and Eastern U.S. in early March ($4.5 Billion), and the Tornado Outbreak in the Central and Eastern part of the Nation March 31 – April 1 ($4.3 Billion).
The number of extreme weather events has seen a “staggering rise” in the past 30 years, says the United Nations, and experts warn climate change is “supercharging these extreme events,” according to The Associated Press (AP). Intense heat as well as extreme rainfall events “are getting more frequent, more severe,” explained Kai Kornhuber, a research scientist at Columbia University.
Climate change is also causing more “compound events,” NPR reported, which is when “climate change causes two extreme things to happen at the same time,” according to an annual report by the American Meteorological Society. “The risk of extreme events is growing, and they’re affecting every corner of the world,” warned Sarah Kapnick, the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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