Frost/Freeze in the United States

How dangerous are Frost/Freeze events in the U.S.?

The loss ranking is the stronger warning against reading frequency alone. Frost/Freeze is #19 of 54 by event count but rises to #13 for combined property and crop damage. Its losses make up 0.3% of the catalog total, while its fatalities rank #39 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 2020, logging 878 events and $0 in property damage in a single calendar year. The most recent year in the dataset is 2025 with 276 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.

This hazard is recorded far more often than it proves fatal. Among the 44 hazard types with at least 100 recorded events it ranks #19 by frequency but only #40 by fatalities per event, at 2 deaths across 6,034 recorded events. Recorded damage averages $142.7K per event, so its cumulative toll is driven mainly by how routinely it occurs rather than by the severity of any one event.

Where this hazard actually strikes varies sharply by region. The three states absorbing the largest share of events are California (781 events, 0 fatalities), Kentucky (694 events, 0 fatalities), Virginia (539 events, 0 fatalities), a pattern driven more by climatology than by any one state's vulnerability. At the other end, states such as District of Columbia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania 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: 2 fatalities and 6 injuries among 6,034 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.