39 Weather Disasters In 2018 Clocked In @ At Least $1 Billion

Above: The costliest weather disaster of 2018 was Hurricane Michael, which made landfall on Florida's Panhandle as a top-end Category 4 storm with 155 mph winds on October 10, 2018, pushing a storm surge of 15+ feet to the coast. Michael killed 32 people and did damage of $17 billion. Here, we see a man walk through a beachfront neighborhood that was decimated by Michael’s storm surge. Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Earth was besieged by 39 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2018, the fourth-highest inflation-adjusted number of billion-dollar weather events on record, said insurance broker Aon (formerly called Aon Benfield) in their annual report issued January 22. Only 2011, with 44 billion-dollar weather disasters, and 2010 and 2013, with 41 each, had more. The annual average of billion-dollar weather disasters is 25 since 1990 (see Figure 1 below).

The U.S. had the most billion-dollar weather disasters in 2018 of any country, with 16. That's their second highest total on record, behind the 20 billion-dollar weather disasters of 2017. NOAA has not yet released their final list of billion-dollar disasters for the U.S. in 2018, due to the government shutdown. China had seven billion-dollar weather disasters in 2018. The combined economic losses (insured and uninsured) from all 394 weather and earthquake disasters catalogued by Aon in 2018 was $225 billion (2018 USD), which is 33% above the 1980 - 2017 inflation-adjusted average of $169 billion. The great bulk of the 2018 total came from weather-related disasters ($215 billion of the $225 billion).
Notable records

Seven billion-dollar droughts hit Earth in 2018, the highest number on record. The previous record was six, in 1999 and 2015. Total damages from drought in 2018 were in excess of $27 billion, the highest total since 2013.

The most expensive wildfire in world history occurred in 2018: the Camp Fire, which devastated Paradise, California, killing 86 and causing $15 billion in damage. The previous costliest fire in world history was 2017's Wine Country fire in California, which killed 43 and did $13 billion in damage. The world's third costliest fire in history also occurred in 2018--the Woolsey fire in Malibu/Thousand Oaks, California, which did $5.8 billion in damage.

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Figure 1. The yearly number of billion-dollar (2018 USD) global weather disasters, adjusted for inflation, as compiled by insurance broker Aon Benfield in their Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Reports. The year 2018 had the fourth-highest number of billion-dollar global weather disasters on record for a year--thanks, in part, to an unusually persistent and extreme summertime jet stream pattern that brought extended periods of extreme weather to portions of the globe. The increasing trend in weather disaster losses in recent decades is largely due to increases in wealth and population and to people moving to more vulnerable areas, but climate change is likely to play an increasing role in coming decades. We discussed this topic in more detail in a 2012 post, Damage Losses and Climate Change.

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https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Earths-39-Billion-Dollar-Weather-Disasters-2018-4th-Most-Record?cm_ven=cat6-widget