Weather Extremes: Death Toll Higher Than NOAA Says

Notably, it excludes the flash flooding that killed around 20 people in central Tennessee in August.But more importantly, excess deaths analyses run by BuzzFeed News have shown that NOAA’s numbers for fatalities in the two deadliest extreme weather events of 2021 reflect only a fraction of the death toll.NOAA counted 229 deaths from the extreme heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in late June, and 226 from the blast of Arctic air that enveloped much of the nation in mid-February — at least 210 of those in Texas, where the winter storm caused widespread power outages. The country’s six warmest years have all occurred in the past decade: 2012 was the hottest, followed by 2016, 2017, 2021, 2015, and 2020.This post was updated to note that NOAA amended the event descriptions in its billion dollar disasters database for the Texas winter storm and the Pacific Northwest heat wave to acknowledge that each may have caused “hundreds of additional deaths,” after a query from BuzzFeed News.Peter Aldhous is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.Contact Peter Aldhous at peter.aldhous@buzzfeed.com.Got a confidential tip?