Astronomical Low Tide in the United States

How dangerous are Astronomical Low Tide events in the U.S.?

The loss ranking is the stronger warning against reading frequency alone. Astronomical Low Tide is #37 of 54 by event count but rises to #31 for combined property and crop damage. Its losses make up <0.1% of the catalog total, while its fatalities rank #44 and represent <0.1% of recorded deaths. Fewer events can still produce an outsized financial record.

The annual record is uneven rather than steadily rising or falling. The peak year on record was 2015, logging 80 events and $0 in property damage in a single calendar year. The most recent year in the dataset is 2025 with 51 events recorded. Across the full 11-year window, annual event counts reflect natural year-to-year noise given how infrequently this hazard is recorded at all.

Frequency and per-event lethality sit close together for this hazard: #37 by event count and #33 by fatalities per event among the 44 types with at least 100 recorded events, at 2.8 deaths per 1,000 recorded events. Recorded damage averages $31.2K per event. Neither the cumulative total nor the rate is misleading here -- they tell the same story.

Where this hazard actually strikes varies sharply by region. The three states absorbing the largest share of events are Louisiana (153 events, 0 fatalities), New Jersey (50 events, 0 fatalities), Texas (48 events, 0 fatalities), a pattern driven more by climatology than by any one state's vulnerability. At the other end, states such as Nebraska, Connecticut, Alabama report far fewer events, often reflecting hazard climatology rather than underreporting.

The cumulative NOAA record has a smaller reported human toll than most hazard types on this measure: 1 fatality and 1 injury among 351 events. PlainHazard's low human-toll band means fewer than five recorded fatalities during 2015-2025. It does not mean that an individual event is harmless, or that unrecorded impacts are zero.

NOAA entries are reports filed by local National Weather Service offices. Counts therefore reflect both observed weather and reporting practice; they do not measure unreported events, household exposure, or the probability of a future event at one address.