Billion-dollar weather disasters on the rise

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - Billion-dollar weather disasters aren’t anything new, but the rate at which they’re occurring is alarming.

In 2024, so far, there have been 24 confirmed weather disasters (events) with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the U.S. according to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

The NCEI is the nation’s ‘scorekeeper,’ if you will, when it comes to addressing severe weather and climate events from a historical perspective. NCEI also is responsible for tracking and evaluating climate events that have great economic and societal impacts.

So far this year, there have been 17 severe storm events, 4 tropical cyclone events, 1 wildfire event, and 2 winter storm events that have all had a price tag of $1 billion or more.

In Tennessee, we were impacted by a few of those billion-dollar disasters. The winter storm that brought more than 7″ of snow to much of the state in January, along with a week of below-freezing temperatures had an estimated cost of $1.9 billion and caused at least 41 deaths in multiple states.

We also had devastating impacts from Hurricane Helene in East Tennessee. Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida but moved inland wreaking havoc on much of the southeast. East Tennessee and Western North Carolina were particularly hit hard.

The governor of NC, Roy Cooper, said that an early estimate for the cost of damages from Helene was around $53 billion dollars.

The annual average of billion-dollar weather disasters for the most recent 5 years (2019-2023) is 20.4. We have had 24 so far this year, and that number could keep climbing. This is not the kind of record you want to break.

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