Amy Freeze
Amy Elizabeth Freeze is a meteorologist, currently working for Fox Weather that is available through a phone app and the Internet. She worked for an ABC affiliate in New York for ten years. She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Freeze was born in Utah on June 19, 1974, and raised in Indiana. She is the eldest of the five daughters of Bill and Linda Freeze. She attended Brigham Young University on a cheerleading scholarship where she earned a BA degree in communications. She was working as an entertainment reporter in Portland when she was asked to do the weather for a colleague who was on medical leave, in part because her name was so perfect. She loved it so she went back to college and earned a BS degree in geosciences with an emphasis on severe weather and forecasting from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree in environmental science with an emphasis in storm-water management from the University of Pennsylvania.
In addition, Freeze has studied international politics in Johannesburg during the re-election campaign of Nelson Mandela, and, as a member of the Radio and Television News Director Association since 1994, she was chosen to participate in the 1996 RTNDF/RIAS German Journalism Exchange, which included the study of German politics, the European Union and NATO. Before leaving Berlin, she produced two documentaries that aired on cable.
After graduating from BYU, she worked in Los Angeles, California at KTLA. She began her broadcasting career on Good Day Oregon in Portland, where the manager needed a weather person and gave her the job because her last name sounded like weather. She worked as a meteorologist and co-host in Philadelphia for an NBC affiliate for four years. During that time she also worked at Rockefeller Center as fill-in for the “Weekend Today Show” and MSNBC. She also worked in Denver at both KWGN and KMGH.
She hosted the first-ever Weather Education Days for MLB’s Chicago White Sox, the Chicago Cubs, and for the Chicago Wolves Hockey team. In Chicago, she was the first female chief meteorologist.
She has covered movies and entertainment and also broadcast in sports. She was the first-ever female sideline reporter for Major League Soccer working for the Colorado Rapids, LA Galaxy, and the Chicago Fire. She also worked on the sidelines for the NFL Chicago Bears for four seasons. She reported on the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and Atlanta.
Freeze became the weekend morning weather-caster at WABC-TV in New York City in 2011.
She has been awarded for her work. Freeze has certificate number 111 from the American Meteorological Society as a Certified Broadcast Meteorologist; she is one of only a few women in the world to receive this certification. She also has Seals of Approval from the National Weather Association and the American Meteorological Society. She has won three Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Science.
Under her title “Freeze Frame,” she is known to include in her forecasts her viewers’ digital photos that capture the weather. She also created a special segment called “The Freeze Factor” where she rates the next day’s weather on a scale of 1 to 10.
Freeze is a certified scuba diver and has run in several marathons. She and her then-husband won $100,000 in the Body for Life fitness contest in 1999.
Freeze met her first husband, Gary Arbuckle, at BYU. They have four children but were divorced in 2016.
Amy has been an answer on the popular long-running game show "Jeopardy!' One answer was “Amy Freeze and Dallas Raines have this profession.” (The question: What is meteorology?) The other was, “Amy Freeze became a meteorologist in Chicago at this age, which is also the freezing point.” (The answer is “What is 32?”)
