The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is responsible for monitoring and assessing the Earth’s climate. Each month NCDC provides comprehensive analyses of global and U.S. temperature and precipitation to place the current state of the climate into historical perspective. Identification and assessment of extreme weather events is part of this effort. An “Extreme Weather and Climate Events” suite of web pages highlights these events and provides access to images, descriptions, statistics, and other detailed information for each event via the World Wide Web (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes.html).

One of our more popular reports in the “Extreme Weather and Climate Events” suite is the “Billion Dollar U.S. Weather Disaster” web page - (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/reports/billionz.html), which focuses on extreme events that caused more than $1 billion in monetary losses in the United States, and provides links to detailed reports on many of these events. During the 1980-2003 period, 56 billion-dollar weather disasters occurred in the United States with 44 of these events occurring since 1990. Total costs of the 56 events were over $340 billion, using an inflation/wealth index to adjust damage amounts to 2002 dollars. This paper provides a climatology of these disasters and the damage and loss of life they caused.