This paper reviews three global disaster databases focused on meteorological disasters including Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) of Belgium, NatCat of Munich Re (NatCat) and Sigma of Swiss Re (Sigma). The differences in purposes, criteria and classification of disaster types across global databases are compared. EM-DAT is mostly used globally due to its free accessibility while NatCat and Sigma are more advantageous on economic loss assessment. The global disaster databases have some bias in the collection of early historical disasters and disasters in undeveloped areas as well as ignoring some small-scale disasters. In the future, it is necessary to further improve the reliability and fineness of disaster data, the standards and specifications of databases, and strengthen the cross-checking of multiple disaster databases in order to lay a solid foundation of data for studying the links between climate change, human activities and meteorological disasters.

Keywords： Meteorological disasters; Global database; Disaster loss; Extreme weather