Snowiest Cities in the World: How Snowfall Is Measured and Who Gets the Most

Counting average annual snowfall at each city's main weather station over the 1991–2020 normals, the snowiest cities in the world with more than 100,000 people are Hirosaki in Japan, with about 679 cm (22 ft) a year, Aomori with 567 cm and Asahikawa with 557 cm, followed by Otaru, Hakusan, Sapporo, Nagaoka, Kitami and Jōetsu. All nine are in Japan, where winter winds cross the Sea of Japan and dump their moisture on the mountains behind the coast. The tenth, and the snowiest city outside Japan, is St. John's in Canada at 363 cm; Syracuse, Moncton, Saguenay and Quebec City follow at roughly 3 metres a year. Which city comes first depends on what is measured, so the measurement comes first here.

What "snowiest" counts: JMA, NOAA and Environment Canada snowfall normals

Three different numbers get quoted as "snow", and they rank cities differently. Snowfall is the total depth of fresh snow that falls over a season, measured each day on a snow board and added up. Snow depth is how much is lying on the ground at a given moment, after melting and settling. Snow days count days with measurable snowfall. A city can have huge snowfall and modest depth if it thaws between storms, which is common in Atlantic Canada.

A fourth measure, the water the snow contains, shows how fluffy most of it is. Environment Canada's figures for Quebec City put the melt from its 316 cm of annual snowfall at 303 mm of water, about one part water to ten parts snow. That is why snowfall totals look so dramatic next to rainfall: a metre of snow on the snow board can be as little as 100 mm of precipitation in the rain gauge. Single-day records are another category again. Mount Ibuki in central Japan is credited with 230 cm in 24 hours on 14 February 1927, often quoted as a world record, but that was a mountain, not a city.

This ranking uses annual snowfall only, taken from each country's national weather service as reproduced in the climate tables on Wikipedia in 2026: the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) for Japan, NOAA for the United States and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) for Canada, using 1991–2020 normals wherever they are given. It also uses one station per city, normally the main city observatory or airport, and only cities of at least 100,000 people that have such a table. Each of those choices changes the answer.

• The station. Aomori's city limits include Sukayu Onsen, a mountain station at 890 m that averages 1,706 cm a year. Count it and Aomori wins easily; count the city observatory at 2.8 m above sea level and it is 567 cm.
• The period. The Syracuse article on Wikipedia still quotes an older average of 115.6 inches (294 cm), while NOAA's 1991–2020 table gives 127.8 inches (325 cm). St. John's is quoted at 242.8 cm in its article text but 363.4 cm in the ECCC 1991–2020 airport table, and Quebec City's text gives 316 cm while the monthly 1991–2020 airport figures add up to about 298 cm.
• The population cut-off. Without one, small Japanese towns and the Tug Hill plateau east of Lake Ontario, which averages more than 200 inches (5.1 m), would fill the list.
• The rival ranking. In 2016 AccuWeather named Aomori the snowiest city in the world, a claim CNN has since repeated. Hirosaki, a smaller city in the same prefecture, records more on JMA's 1991–2020 normals, but its station records only begin in 1976 and it is rarely included in such lists.

Hirosaki, Aomori, Asahikawa and Otaru: the Sea of Japan snow belt

The top of the list is explained by one weather pattern. In winter the Siberian High builds over the Eurasian landmass while the Aleutian Low deepens over the North Pacific, and the gap between them drives bitterly cold north-westerly air across the Sea of Japan. Over the warm Tsushima Current that air picks up moisture, and when it reaches the coast of Honshu and Hokkaido and is forced up the mountains, it falls as snow. The process is the sea-scale version of the lake-effect snow that buries the shores of the Great Lakes.

Hirosaki (157,031 people, January 2026 estimate) lies in the Tsugaru region of western Aomori Prefecture, and its JMA station averages 679 cm. The city has turned the snow into an event: the Hirosaki Castle Snow Lantern Festival, first held in 1977, drew 310,000 visitors in 1999 with 165 standing snow lanterns and 300 small kamakura snow huts.

Aomori (264,945 people in 2023), the prefectural capital on Aomori Bay, averages 567 cm with snow on about 120 days a year. Several winds collide around the city, forcing the air to rise and cool, and the Hakkōda Mountains rise directly to its south. Its deepest recorded snow cover was 209 cm in February 1945; Sapporo's deepest, in 1939, was 164 cm. The Hakkōda range is also where 199 of 210 soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army died on a cold-weather exercise in the winter of 1902, trying to cross from Aomori to Towada, a disaster still known as the Hakkōda Mountains incident.

Asahikawa, a Hokkaido city of about 322,000 people (2011 estimate), gets 557 cm even though it sits inland on the Ishikari River. It is the cold extreme of Japan: a station there recorded −41.0 °C on 25 January 1902, the lowest temperature in Japanese history, and the city holds a winter festival on the riverbank each year. Otaru (107,432 in 2023), the port on Ishikari Bay north-west of Sapporo, averages 556 cm on JMA's normals, while its own Wikipedia article says the city can receive as much as 6.6 m between November and March, another example of how the same city collects different figures.

Hakusan, Sapporo, Nagaoka, Kitami and Jōetsu: the rest of Japan's top nine

Hakusan (113,375 people in 2018), the second city of Ishikawa Prefecture, runs from the Sea of Japan coast up into high mountains in the south-east, part of them inside Hakusan National Park. The JMA station in its climate table averages 518 cm, with 217 cm in January alone, far more than neighbouring Kanazawa's 157 cm.

Sapporo stands apart because of its size. With about 1.96 million people, it receives 479 cm of snowfall a year, on roughly 124 days, and no other city of more than a million gets anything close. The Sapporo Snow Festival, first held in 1950, now draws more than 2 million visitors to its snow and ice statues, and in February 1972 the city hosted the first Winter Olympics held in Asia. Sapporo had been chosen in 1937 for the 1940 Winter Games, which were cancelled after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out.

Nagaoka (264,611 people in 2021), the second city of Niigata Prefecture, lies on the Shinano River and averages 477 cm, almost level with Sapporo. Jōetsu (189,430 in 2020), on the same prefecture's coast, averages 413 cm at the old castle town of Takada, though its article quotes about 6.3 m and a record 14.94 m in the 1985–86 season, since regular measurements began in 1953. Kitami (112,185 in 2023), in Hokkaido's Okhotsk Subprefecture, gets 414 cm; a blizzard in 2004 left 171 cm lying on the ground.

Just outside the top ten come Aizuwakamatsu in Fukushima Prefecture at 328 cm and Hakodate at 306 cm. Below them the totals fall quickly: inland Yamagata averages 285 cm, and the coastal observatories at Akita 273 cm, Toyama 253 cm, Kanazawa 157 cm and Niigata only 139 cm.

St. John's, Syracuse, Quebec City and Saguenay: North America's snowiest cities

Outside Japan the snowiest large cities sit in two settings: downwind of the Great Lakes and in eastern Canada, from the St. Lawrence valley to the Atlantic coast.

St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, averages 363 cm at its airport in the ECCC 1991–2020 table, making it the only city outside Japan in the top ten. Rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow can all fall in a single storm, so snow cover comes and goes. On 17 January 2020 a blizzard dropped an estimated 76 cm, the city's one-day record, with winds up to 130 km/h; a state of emergency lasted eight days and the Canadian Army helped dig the city out.

Syracuse, New York (148,620 people at the 2020 census), averages 127.8 inches (325 cm) at Syracuse Hancock airport. Cold air crossing Lake Ontario picks up moisture and drops it as lake-effect snow over Central New York, giving Syracuse the most annual snow of any metropolitan area in the United States and the usual winner of the Golden Snowball Award among upstate cities. Its record season, 1992–93, brought 192.1 inches (488 cm). Its upstate rivals trail: Rochester averages 102.0 inches and Buffalo 95.4, and across the state line Erie, Pennsylvania, 104.3.

Moncton, New Brunswick, which passed 100,000 people in 2025, averages 310 cm at its airport. Quebec City (549,459 people in 2021) receives about 298 cm a year on the 1991–2020 airport normals, or 316 cm in the figure its article quotes, part of 1,190 mm of total precipitation, and snow usually lies from the end of November to mid-April. Across the river, Lévis is listed at 322 cm on older 1981–2010 normals. About 200 km to the north by road, Saguenay on the Saguenay River averages 302 cm at CFB Bagotville. Even so, Hirosaki's total is more than twice Quebec City's. To see why cold alone does not make snow, read our explainer on why it snows, compare these totals with the places that are simply the coldest cities in the world, or see how whole nations compare in our guide to the countries with the most snow.