Select annual weather-related deaths

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	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002
Flood Flood A flood is an overflow of an expanse of water that submerges land. The EU Floods directive defines a flood as a temporary covering by water of land not normally covered by water... s	118	136	68	38	49	49
Lightning strikes Lightning Lightning is an atmospheric electrostatic discharge accompanied by thunder, which typically occurs during thunderstorms, and sometimes during volcanic eruptions or dust storms...	42	44	46	51	44	51
Tornado Tornado A tornado is a violent, dangerous, rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. They are often referred to as a twister or a cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology in a wider... es	68	130	94	43	40	55
Temperature extremes	123	182	509	170	170	178
Hurricanes	1	9	17	0	24	53
Snow Snow Snow is a form of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by... /Ice Ice Ice is water frozen into the solid state. Usually ice is the phase known as ice Ih, which is the most abundant of the varying solid phases on the Earth's surface. It can appear transparent or opaque bluish-white color, depending on the presence of impurities or air inclusions...	89	76	66	57	33	33

This data was tabulated from data from the National Climatic Data Center.

This table represents a 6 year period and only a select type of recorded weather events. The data was tabulated from the NCDC website by running searches on the specified weather events recorded with at least 1 fatality. The yearly timeframes were selected to cover January 1 to December 31 of each year for each event type. This table does not provide a comprehensive total of all weather-related events. Also, this is not necessarily a weather event severity comparison, but is more of an indicator of frequency of fatal occurrences for some events. However, the unexpected leader of fatalities comes from the temperature extremes

Extreme weather

Extreme weather includes weather phenomena that are at the extremes of the historical distribution, especially severe or unseasonal weather. The most commonly used definition of extreme weather is based on an event's climatological distribution. Extreme weather occurs only 5% or less of the time...

 category. That category includes heat wave

Heat wave

A heat wave is a prolonged period of excessively hot weather, which may be accompanied by high humidity. There is no universal definition of a heat wave; the term is relative to the usual weather in the area...

s as well as cold extremes.