Record-breaking wildfires across the Northern Hemisphere have been making headlines, so it may be surprising to learn that U.S. wildfire frequency and severity for 2023 are on track to be the lowest in the past two decades. In fact, while recent years have seen individual events that smashed historical records, the 24-year national trend has been downward.

Each year across the United States, weather-related disasters result in loss of life and cause billions of dollars in property damage. Some events can be predicted, such as hurricanes, allowing you time to prepare your family and home, while other weather-related events evolve rapidly and need a quick response.

Thunderstorms and Lightning

Thunderstorms are the most common weather event in the country, and by definition always include lightning. Approximately 10,000 thunderstorms occur annually, making the risk of damage from lightning quite high.

Severe convective storms are among the most common, most damaging natural catastrophes in the United States. The result of warm, moist air rising from the earth, they manifest in various ways, depending on atmospheric conditions—from drenching thunderstorms with lightning, to tornadoes, hail, or destructive straight-line winds. Recent years have seen an increase in organized lines of thunderstorms with widespread damaging winds, known as derechos. As of late September 2023, U.S.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene across a 500-mile swath of the U.S. Southeast, including Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee, is just the latest example in recent years of the growing vulnerability of inland areas to flooding from both tropical storms and severe convective storms. These events also highlight the scale of the flood-protection gap in non-coastal areas.

Hurricanes

A distinguishing feature of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is a tug-of-war between a shift from cool- to warm-water conditions in the central Pacific Ocean and exceedingly warm tropical Atlantic waters. These warming conditions are part of a global pattern that is now outpacing anything seen in four decades of satellite observations.