As communities across the country become increasingly vulnerable to severe weather events, the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently launched a comprehensive initiative to build a “Weather-ready” nation to make America safer by saving more lives and protecting livelihoods during such events as tornado outbreaks, intense heat waves, flooding, active hurricane seasons, and solar storms that threaten electrical and communication systems.

NOAA also announced that 2011 tied the 2008 record for billion-dollar disasters in the United States so far experiencing nine separate disasters, each with an economic loss of $1 billion or more. The latest event to surpass the $1 billion price tag is this summer’s flooding along the Missouri and Souris rivers in the upper Midwest. This year’s losses have so far amounted to more than $35 billion. Release