Explore every city
All 3,173 U.S. cities with at least 10,000 residents, 2010–2025. Colors show deciles rather than exact ranks: once sampling and model uncertainty are included, a typical city’s rank could move across 828 places.
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How to read this
- Read deciles, not exact ranks. The median city’s 90% rank interval spans 374 places from weighting choices alone, and 828 once event sampling and model refitting are included.
- Four components, kept apart. Burden is what was documented, risk what is modelled, capacity what an agency recorded, and outcome how a city fared against its exposure. The overall rank is a supplementary screening index that weights outcome and capacity equally.
- Capacity means recorded activity. A city with no FEMA record hasn’t been shown to do no mitigation, and one covered by a county-wide plan may show no city-level record.
- Damage is a lower bound. NOAA Storm Events captures about a quarter of national billion-dollar losses.
- Compare neighbours within a county. For drought, ice storms and heat waves, outcome scores are largely shared across a county, so the within-county score is the fairer comparison.
Data: “Extreme-event burden, risk identification, resilience measures, and readiness of U.S. cities from 2010–2025.” Anika Raj (first author), with Dr. Abhinav Wadhwa and Dr. Ashish Sharma, Discovery Partners Institute, University of Illinois System. Read the story behind the numbers →