Japan, Canada and the United States are the countries with the most snow where people actually live: in AccuWeather’s 2016 ranking of the snowiest cities with more than 100,000 people, Japan’s Aomori comes first with about 792 cm (312 in) a year, Canada’s St. John’s leads its country with about 333 cm (131 in), and Syracuse in New York leads the United States with about 315 cm (124 in). Japan alone holds four of the ten places, Canada three and the United States three, and no other country appears. Japan and the United States also hold the snowfall records outside cities: the highest average at an inhabited place (Sukayu Onsen, Japan, about 17.6 m a year) and the biggest single season ever measured (Mt. Baker Ski Area, Washington, 29 m in 1998–99).
Snowfall, snow depth or snow cover: what “most snow” is counting
No agency publishes an official snowfall total for whole countries, and it would mean little if one did. Russia and Canada have far more snow-covered ground in January than Japan does, simply because they are enormous and cold. But being covered in snow is not the same as receiving a lot of it. There are three different things people mean by “most snow”.
- Snowfall: the total depth of fresh snow that falls over a winter, added up storm by storm. Weather services report it in centimetres or inches as an annual average over a 30-year period.
- Snow depth: how much is lying on the ground at one moment. Aomori’s record is 209 cm, set in February 1945.
- Snow cover: how much of a country’s area is white, and for how long. This favours the far north, even where very little snow falls.
This article uses snowfall, because it is what people mean by “the snowiest place”. It also uses the one international comparison that measures snowfall the same way for every entry: AccuWeather’s list of the snowiest major cities, written by Michael Kuhne and published in January 2016, which drew on data from the Japan Meteorological Agency and The Weather Network. It only counted cities of more than 100,000 people, so remote mountain stations are left out. Those appear in a separate section below. The rival source is each national weather service’s own 1991–2020 climate normals, published after the AccuWeather list. Those newer averages shuffle the order, and the table further down shows where.
AccuWeather’s 2016 top ten: four Japanese, three Canadian, three American cities
The ranking below lists AccuWeather’s ten cities in order, with the country and the average annual snowfall. Quebec City and Syracuse tied for fifth, so AccuWeather has no sixth place and resumes at seventh. The centimetre figures are converted from AccuWeather’s inches.
| Rank | City | Country | Average annual snowfall |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aomori | Japan | 792 cm (312 in) |
| 2 | Sapporo | Japan | 485 cm (191 in) |
| 3 | Toyama | Japan | 363 cm (143 in) |
| 4 | St. John’s | Canada | 333 cm (131 in) |
| 5= | Syracuse | United States | 315 cm (124 in) |
| 5= | Quebec City | Canada | 315 cm (124 in) |
| 7 | Saguenay | Canada | 312 cm (123 in) |
| 8 | Akita | Japan | 272 cm (107 in) |
| 9 | Rochester | United States | 251 cm (99 in) |
| 10 | Buffalo | United States | 241 cm (95 in) |
On this list Japan’s snowiest city gets more than twice as much snow as the snowiest city in Canada or the United States. That gap is the strongest single reason to call Japan the snowiest country, even though its total area is only a fraction of either North American country.
Aomori, Sapporo, Toyama and Akita: Japan’s Sea of Japan coast
Every Japanese city on the list lies on the Sea of Japan side of the country, and that is the explanation. In winter the Siberian High builds over the Eurasian landmass while the Aleutian Low deepens over the northern Pacific. Between them, a steady northwest wind carries frozen continental air across the sea. The air picks up moisture from the relatively warm water and drops it as heavy snow when it hits the mountains running down the spine of Honshu and Hokkaido. The Pacific side of the same islands, including Tokyo, gets clear, dry winter weather under the same wind.
Aomori sits at the top of Honshu, between Mutsu Bay and the Hakkōda Mountains. The Japan Meteorological Agency’s 1991–2020 normals show 195 cm of snow falling in an average January and 143 cm in December. Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido and host of the 1972 Winter Olympics, gets about 479 cm a year under the same normals, which is remarkable for a city of close to two million people. Akita, on the Tōhoku coast, gets about 273 cm.
Toyama shows the mountain effect most clearly. The city itself gets a few metres a year, but the Tateyama range behind it catches far more. On the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, snowploughs cut a road through snowpack each spring, leaving the walls known as Yuki-no-Ōtani. They stand 15 to 20 m high from mid-April into June.
St. John’s, Quebec City, Saguenay and the Great Lakes snowbelt
North America’s snowiest cities fall into two groups, and neither is in the coldest part of the continent. St. John’s, on the eastern edge of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, is one of the oldest cities in North America and gets its snow from storms coming off the Atlantic. Quebec City and Saguenay lie inland in the St. Lawrence and Saguenay valleys. Saguenay was only formed in 2002, when Chicoutimi merged with neighbouring municipalities.
Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo in New York State get lake-effect snow. When very cold air crosses the relatively warm open water of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the lowest layer of air is heated and picks up moisture. That moisture rises and falls as snow on the downwind (east and southeast) shores, often in narrow bands that can drop several centimetres an hour. Japan’s coast works the same way on a larger scale, with the Sea of Japan in place of a lake. That is why the Wikipedia article on lake-effect snow groups the Great Lakes snowbelts with the west coast of northern Japan.
What the 1991–2020 normals change
AccuWeather’s figures come from climate averages published before 2016. National weather services have since moved to 1991–2020 normals, and the new numbers change the ranking in ways that matter for this question. Aomori stays first, but its average drops from 792 cm to 567 cm. Toyama falls furthest, from 363 cm to 253 cm, and slips below Rochester. St. John’s, on the other hand, rises to about 363 cm under Environment Canada’s 1991–2020 normals, which moves it up to third among the eight cities charted below.
The two sources disagree on the details but agree on the answer. On either set of figures Aomori comes first, and Japanese cities still hold two of the top three places. The drop in Japanese figures between the two sets of averages is a reminder to treat any single snowfall number as an average of one 30-year period, not a permanent fact about a place.
Sukayu Onsen, Mount Ibuki and Mt. Baker: records beyond the city limits
The 100,000-person cut-off keeps the list comparable, but it leaves out the places where the most snow actually falls. Japan and the United States hold those records.
Sukayu Onsen, Japan, is a hot-spring inn in the Hakkōda Mountains, inside the city limits of Aomori. Its 1981–2010 average of 1,764 cm (about 58 ft) a year is the world record for average annual snowfall, and Wikipedia describes the inn as the snowiest inhabited place on Earth. Its winter-season record is 23.7 m, and on 26 February 2013 it recorded a snow depth of 566 cm, the deepest ever measured at a certified Japan Meteorological Agency station. The road to it stays open all winter.
Mount Ibuki, on the border of Shiga and Gifu prefectures, holds the record for the most snow in 24 hours: 230 cm on 14 February 1927.
Mt. Baker Ski Area, United States, in Whatcom County, Washington, about 16 km south of the Canadian border, recorded 2,896 cm (1,140 in, or 95 ft) in the 1998–99 season. That is the greatest snowfall ever measured in a single season. It broke the record of 2,850 cm set on Mount Rainier in 1971–72. The resort’s long-term average is about 1,630 cm (641 in) a year. The mechanism is the same as in Japan and around the Great Lakes: moist Pacific air rises over the Cascade Range and drops its moisture as snow.
Why Russia and Norway are not on the list
Most people guess Russia before Japan, and the reason it is missing says a lot about how snow forms. Heavy snow needs moisture as well as cold, and the coldest places are usually dry. Yakutsk in eastern Siberia has some of the coldest winters of any city on Earth, but the Siberian High that sits over it all winter blocks moist air, so most of its limited precipitation falls as summer rain. The ground stays white for months because nothing melts, not because much snow falls. Much of northern Canada is dry in the same way, and interior Antarctica is drier still.
Snowy places need a source of moisture upwind of cold ground: the Sea of Japan, the Great Lakes, the North Atlantic or the Pacific rising over the Cascades. Russia has its own lake-effect snowbelt around Lake Baikal, but neither Russia nor Norway has a city of 100,000 people on AccuWeather’s list. If the question is which country has the most snow on the ground, Russia and Canada win on area. If it is where the most snow falls, the answer is Japan, followed by Canada and the United States.
For a closer look at the ten cities, see our guide to the snowiest cities in the world. The physics of snowflakes is explained in why it snows, and the mountains that make Aomori so snowy are part of our overview of Japan’s geography.