The policy neutral nonprofit Climate Central has taken on the database that was previously kept by NOAA. Senior climate scientist Adam Smith, who led the project under NOAA for 15 years, will be in charge of keeping it current and up-to-date.
The data is used to record weather events and assess the impact they have.
“Extremes impact different places and people in different ways, depending on how prepared you are for them or how much risk or vulnerability you might have to them. And so we're trying to provide data and information from many different directions,” Smith said.
When NOAA ended the project in early 2025, many groups in local communities, people in academia and even Congress pushed for the database to be picked up. The data collected has many uses — including research.
“You would see a difference in the ratios and the risk climatologies of how these different sized impact events by geography, by hazard type, how those change. And that's another kind of data dimension that is informative to people. Even after you're rebuilding post-disaster, you know, how should you choose to rebuild, maybe with more resilience. So the next disaster won't impact you in the same way,” Smith said.
In 2026 they plan to release a redeveloped mapping section. This will assess risk on a county to county basis. It will allow for the comparison of impact and frequencies of smaller scale events with the major billion dollar disasters.
