For the United States, 2011 has been a costly year when it comes to weather and climate disasters, suffering 12 separate billion dollar disasters in the year alone.
The total aggregate damage for the year totals an approximate $52 billion, breaking the previous record of nine separate billion dollar weather/climate disasters in 2008.
Sadly, across all twelve disasters a total of 646 human lives were lost. The National Weather Service is reporting that across all weather categories for the year of 2011 over a thousand lives were lost.
According to NOAA, only 10 billion dollar events had been reported, but two new billion dollar weather and climate events were added: the Texas, New Mexico, Arizona wildfires event was separated from the larger Southern Plains drought and heatwave event; and the June 18-22 Midwest/Southeast Tornadoes and Severe Weather event.
NOAA is continuing work collecting and assessing data regarding several other extreme weather events that took place in 2011, including the pre-Halloween winter storm that impacted the Northeast and the wind/flood damage from Tropical Storm Lee, but so far these events are not billion dollar events.