A Historical Extreme Cold Events Dataset for Building Energy and Resilience Modeling Across the United States.

Extreme cold snaps pose significant risks to buildings, infrastructure, energy systems, and occupants, yet standardized climatic datasets tailored for resilience-focused building performance modeling remain limited. This study presents a methodology and corresponding dataset of cold snap events for 217 U.S. cities, derived from 24 years of historical hourly temperature data obtained from the NASA POWER project. Cold snaps were detected using a percentile-based, location-specific threshold that identifies periods of "abnormal cold" with additional constraints to ensure that events reflect meaningful differences from local winter conditions. Each event was characterized using a suite of metrics, including event duration, heating degree hours, and overcooling degree. Events were further classified into four categories based on the mean outdoor air dry-bulb temperature, analogous to intensity scales used in other hazard domains. A selection procedure was applied to ensure that each city is represented by a small set of short, medium, and long-duration events, resulting in a curated dataset of 880 cold snaps suitable for building energy simulations and resilience assessments. The dataset is provided as EnergyPlus Weather (EPW) files accompanied by a summary spreadsheet containing all events and their metrics. This dataset supports the systematic evaluation of building performance under extreme cold weather conditions and provides a foundation for thermal and energy resilience modeling across the U.S. climates.