Extreme weather took toll on U.S. in 2022

Storms fueled crippling floods in Missouri and Kentucky. A drought starved Lake Mead, Lake Powell and much of the American West, endangering water supplies and creating conditions for devastating wildfires.

A deadly collection of 83 tornadoes tore across the South. Golf-ball-size hail battered swaths of Minnesota and Wisconsin, damaging homes, vehicles and businesses. Unprecedented flooding inundated Yellowstone National Park. The Christmas week winter storm for the ages blasted much of the nation with biting cold, and blizzard conditions pummeled western New York, leaving more than two dozen people dead.

And the catastrophe that was Hurricane Ian steamrolled parts of Florida and lumbered up the East Coast this fall, leaving tens of billions of dollars of damage in its wake and killing more than 125 people.

While weather disasters strike the United States every year, 2022 brought the latest reminder that extreme events, fueled in part by the warming planet, are growing more intense and costly — both at home and abroad.

According to federal officials, there were 15 “billion-dollar disaster” events as of mid-December. While that number is mercifully lower than the record years of 2020 and 2021 — which saw 22 and 20 such disasters, respectively — it still represents a high amount of suffering.

Over the past four decades, the United States has experienced an average of 7.7 of these devastating disasters annually. But since 2017, the average has jumped to nearly 18 each year.

More frequent disasters mean less time to prepare for each one. An analysis by the research nonprofit Climate Central found that from 2017 to 2021, the nation experienced a billion-dollar disaster every 18 days on average, compared with 82 days between such events on average in the 1980s.

“The lessons we are learning from these more frequent, more costly extreme weather events should be apparent now across many regions,” said Adam Smith, an economist and scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “There’s no reason to expect that the trends will reverse or flat line.”

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 7,472,995 acres were burned by wildfire as of Dec. 23.

“Twenty years ago, this would have been considered an above-normal season,” said Jim Wallman, an NIFC meteorologist. But what is normal is changing. “This is like what would be considered an average season right now.”

Wallman said that in the decade preceding 2005, wildfires burned an average of 6.3 million acres each year. By 2021, that 10-year annual average had risen to more than 7 million acres — a more than 10 percent increase.

Alaska saw the largest amount of scorched land by far during 2022, at more than 3 million acres. New Mexico experienced record wildfires this spring, and states such as Texas, Oregon and Idaho saw hundreds of thousands of acres burned, with many of those blazes human-caused.

A new analysis this year revealed that 1 in 6 Americans now live in an area with significant wildfire risk.