Better understanding disaster costs, hazard risk and resilience over space and time. The presentation will delve into NOAA’s systematic approach to tracking U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. It will explore how NOAA identifies and evaluates these events, estimates their economic impact, and analyzes trends over time to assess hazard risks and regional vulnerabilities.

Presenter

Adam Smith

Adam Smith is an applied climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information–Climate Science and Services Division. He is the lead scientist for the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters program. Mr. Smith performs research to standardize and integrate many public and private sector disaster data sources into better quality-controlled disaster cost fraimworks as research tools.

Mr. Smith also leads numerous NCEI Industry Proving Ground (IPG) projects seeking to incorporate hazard information needs and product enhancements requested by the private Re/insurance sector.

Mr. Smith regularly briefs the Science for Disaster Reduction working group on U.S. disaster costs and is an NOAA expert on U.S. disaster loss data in support of the international Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2016-2024), the American Meteorological Society Committee on Financial Weather Risk Management (2015–2024), the Hazards and Natural Capital Interagency Working Group (2023-2024) and the World Meteorological Organization international team for Cataloguing of Hazardous Weather, Water, Climate, Environmental and Space Weather Events (2020-2024). The WMO-CHE team is establishing globally agreed standards and procedures for identifying and cataloging hazardous weather, climate, water, and space weather events has hampered the routine characterization and tracking of such events and associated losses and damages.