USA's snowiest cities and towns: These locations get so much snow
Snow may be a beautiful nuisance or a grim danger for cities and towns across the nation this winter — some more so than others.
But which locations usually get the most snow?
Paste BN looked at weather records for small towns and big cities to find some of the snowiest spots in the nation. As noted in the book "Extreme Weather" by weather historian Christopher Burt, "it's not always clear which city can claim to be the snowiest because there are different ways to define a city and different places within or just outside a city to measure snowfall."
Overall, the snowiest cities in the U.S. are in western New York, while the snowiest parts of the U.S. are the mountains of the West and Alaska.
As for uninhabited locations, Burt said that the snowiest places of all are probably located somewhere in the coastal mountains of Alaska, "but no weather stations exist there to record what may amount to more than 1,000 inches (83 feet) of annual snowfall."
Western New York is snow central
For big cities of at least 100,000 residents, three in western New York take the prize for snowiest, according to National Weather Service data:
- Syracuse, New York
- Rochester, New York
- Buffalo, New York
Thanks primarily to lake-effect snow, the USA's snowiest big city is Syracuse, New York, which gets about 11 feet of snow per winter season, the National Weather Service said. It's also one of the nation's rainiest and cloudiest cities. Other cities in western New York, such as Rochester and Buffalo, average about 9 feet per year, again due to the lake effect.
All three are in the traditional lake-effect snow belts, with cold winds from the west moving across the relatively warm Great Lakes, the Old Farmer's Almanac said.
Snowiest small towns and uninhabited locations
As for smaller towns, the snowiest is Valdez, Alaska, (pop. roughly 4,000), according to National Weather Service data. Valdez picks up an almost unimaginable 23 feet of snow each year.
Valdez once had 180 inches of snow in just one month, Weather.com meteorologist Jonathan Erdman said. That's almost 5 times the average annual snow in Chicago.
In the Lower 48, Truckee, California, in the Sierra Nevada, is one of the snowiest. That small town picks up about 16 feet of snow each year.
As for uninhabited locations that scientists are monitoring, Mount Rainier in Washington state averages about 56 feet of snow per winter, which is among the highest annual totals in the world.
Lake-effect snow machine
When snow piles up in places such as Syracuse or Buffalo in western New York or Marquette in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, people start talking about the "lake-effect snow machine." But what, exactly, is lake-effect snow? How does it happen?
Lake-effect snow, which can last for only a few minutes to several days, develops from narrow bands of clouds that form when cold, dry arctic air passes over a large, relatively mild lake.
As the cold air passes over the unfrozen and "warm" waters of the Great Lakes, warmth and moisture are transferred into the lowest portion of the atmosphere, the National Weather Service says. The air rises, and clouds form and grow into narrow bands that produce 2 to 3 inches of snow an hour or more.
These snows typically occur only in the fall or early winter, before the lakes freeze over. (But if the lakes don't freeze, lake-effect snow can occur throughout the winter and into the spring.)
"Lake-effect snow generated by the Great Lakes is among the heaviest snowfall in the world," said Weather.com meteorologist Jonathan Erdman in an online report.
One of the most noteworthy lake-effect snowfalls in New York State occurred over a 10-day period from Feb. 3-12, 2007, when an incredible 141 inches of snow (that's 11.75 feet) were measured in the town of Redfield, New York, about 50 miles northeast of Syracuse, Erdman said.
Western mountains produce world-record snowfalls
For huge snowfall totals in mainly uninhabited locations, head West:
"Some of the heaviest seasonal snowfall totals in the United States and the world have been recorded in the western mountains of the (lower 48 states)," according to a paper in the journal National Weather Digest. "Especially noteworthy are amounts which have fallen in the Cascade Mountains of the state of Washington, where annual averages exceed 600 inches (50 feet) on windward slopes."
The world record for single season snowfall (95 feet) was set on Mount Baker in the Cascades during the winter of 1998-99.
The heavy snowfall rates there are the result of several factors, the article says: "Winter is naturally the wettest season as the west-to-east planetary circulation expands southward and strengthens in speed, with storms striking the Pacific Northwest every few days.
"Air laden with moisture, after its traverse across the Pacific, is forced to ascend the Cascade Range, dropping abundant precipitation."