The Blizzard of 1977 Buried Buffalo for Five Days — on Barely a Foot of New Snow
It is the storm every Buffalo winter still gets measured against, and the number behind it is the surprise: only about 12 inches of new snow fell at the airport over five days. What turned that into a killer that shut Western New York down was the wind — gusts to 69 mph driving the winter’s already-deep snowpack off the frozen face of Lake Erie.
Pull up almost any retrospective on the Blizzard of 1977 and you’ll see the same question asked a dozen ways: how did a storm that dropped only about a foot of snow kill roughly 29 people and lock down a major American city for the better part of a week? The answer is that it was never really a snowstorm. It was a wind event on a city that was already buried.
By late January 1977, Buffalo had taken an extraordinary amount of snow, and Lake Erie had frozen over early and solid. When an arctic front swept in on January 28 with hurricane-force gusts, all of that loose snow — on the ground and on the ice — lifted into the air at once. Here’s what our station record shows, and why the real story is the 120 inches that fell before the storm, not the foot that fell during it.
The 120 Inches That Were Already on the Ground
Most blizzard stories start when the storm arrives. This one starts weeks earlier. Our NOAA station record for Buffalo Niagara International Airport shows 120 inches of snow fell between December 1, 1976 and January 27, 1977 — ten feet of snowfall before the blizzard dropped a single flake. The 1976–77 season would finish with 199.8 inches at the airport. By late January the region was sitting under a deep, cold, powdery snowpack, and an unusually frigid December and January had frozen Lake Erie from shore to shore, early.
That detail is the whole story. A frozen Lake Erie is roughly 10,000 square miles of ice, much of it coated in loose, wind-blown snow, with nothing — no open water, no trees, no buildings — to anchor it. All it needed was wind.
Five Days, Day by Day
Daily snowfall and temperature at Buffalo’s airport through the storm, from our NOAA archive. Notice how little snow actually fell — and how brutal the cold was. On Saturday, January 29, the high reached only 5°F and the low hit −7°F; with the wind, the National Weather Service put wind chills at 55 to 60 degrees below zero.
| Date | High | Low | New snow | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fri Jan 28 | 26°F | -4°F | 4.4" | storm begins; temperature crashes |
| Sat Jan 29 | 5°F | -7°F | 1.0" | high of just 5°F; wind chills 55–60 below |
| Sun Jan 30 | 10°F | 4°F | 1.6" | |
| Mon Jan 31 | 15°F | 4°F | 2.2" | |
| Tue Feb 1 | 25°F | 15°F | 3.1" | blizzard ends around midday |
| Jan 28 – Feb 1 total | — | — | 12.3" | new snow only |
Daily values at Buffalo Niagara International Airport (GHCN USW00014733) from our NOAA GHCN-Daily station data, queried November 5, 2026, with a quality-control filter applied. Snowfall is new snow measured at the airport; it does not include the far larger amounts of existing snow the wind moved and redeposited.
Why 12 Inches Shut a City for Five Days
Meteorologists call it a ground blizzard: a storm whose snow isn’t falling so much as flying. When the arctic front crossed Western New York on January 28, winds gusted to 69 mph at the airport and 75 mph at Niagara Falls. The National Weather Service’s own account of the storm is blunt about where the snow came from — of the roughly foot of snow logged at the airport, “much of this is believed to be from existing snow lying on the frozen surface of Lake Erie being blown into the Buffalo area and redeposited.”
The result was total whiteout. Visibility dropped to zero for hours at a stretch, and the wind packed the airborne snow into drifts 30 to 40 feet high — tall enough to bury cars to their roofs and swallow single-story homes to the eaves. Thousands of motorists were stranded where they stopped, on city streets and across the Thruway, and many of the roughly 29 people who died were found frozen in those half-buried cars. This is the opposite failure mode from a storm like the 1996 blizzard, where two feet of falling snow paralyzed the East Coast. In 1977, the snow had mostly already fallen — the wind just refused to let it stay on the ground.
The First Federal Disaster Ever Declared for Snow
Western New York did not dig out quickly. The driving ban held for days; the National Guard was called in to rescue people trapped in cars and homes and to haul food to isolated neighborhoods. When it was over, President Carter declared nine New York counties — seven in the west and two along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario — a federal disaster area. According to the National Weather Service, it was the first time in United States history that a snowstorm triggered a federal disaster declaration.
That designation is why 1977 became a benchmark rather than just a bad winter week. It established, in federal policy, that a blizzard could be a catastrophe on the scale of a hurricane or a flood — a recognition that mattered for every snow-belt city that came after.
Where It Ranks Among Buffalo’s Storms
Buffalo has been buried many times since — the November 2014 “Snowvember” lake-effect event dropped multiple feet on the Southtowns in a matter of days, and the December 2022 Christmas blizzard was, by Erie County’s official count, deadlier locally than 1977. But 1977 remains the reference point, and it’s a different animal from both. Snowvember and 2022 were about extreme snowfall rates; 1977 was about wind and an already-loaded landscape. It is the purest example in the US record of a blizzard made not by how much snow fell but by how much snow was already there — which is exactly why the lake-effect snow belt downwind of the Great Lakes is uniquely exposed to this kind of storm.
See where 1977 lands among the worst blizzards in US history, compare it with the two very different storms that both carried the name in the Blizzard of 1978, and see why Buffalo lives near the top of the snowiest cities in America. If you lived through the Blizzard of ’77 and remember what your street looked like — or still have a photo of a car buried to the antenna — we’d like to hear it; you can look up what your own town recorded that week with our weather-history tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much snow fell in the Blizzard of 1977 in Buffalo?
Surprisingly little new snow — about 12 inches at Buffalo’s airport over January 28–February 1, 1977 (12.3 inches in our NOAA station record). The National Weather Service notes that much of even that total was existing snow blown off the frozen surface of Lake Erie and redeposited. The disaster was a wind event, not a snowfall event: 69 mph gusts lifted a snowpack built by the 120 inches of snow that had already fallen that winter and packed it into 30-to-40-foot drifts.
How many people died in the Blizzard of 1977?
About 29 people died, most of them in Western New York. Many froze in cars that stalled or were buried on roads and the Thruway during the whiteout; wind chills ran 55 to 60 degrees below zero. President Carter declared nine New York counties a federal disaster area — the first time a snowstorm had ever triggered a federal disaster declaration in the United States.
Why was the Blizzard of 1977 so bad if only a foot of snow fell?
Three things stacked up. Buffalo had already received about 120 inches of snow that winter before the storm, so the ground — and the frozen surface of Lake Erie — was covered in deep, loose, cold snow. A fast-moving arctic front then brought sustained winds gusting to 69 mph. With nothing to hold it down, that existing snow lifted and blew east into the city, cutting visibility to zero and piling drifts 30 to 40 feet high that buried cars to the roof.
What are the dates of the Blizzard of 1977?
The storm struck Friday, January 28, 1977 and blizzard or near-blizzard conditions came and went for roughly four more days, ending around midday on Tuesday, February 1. Western New York and southern Ontario were effectively shut down for the duration; some rural residents were trapped for days.
Sources & Method
Daily snowfall and temperature for Buffalo, the Jan 28–Feb 1 storm total (12.3 inches of new snow), the −7°F low on January 29, the 120 inches of snow that fell December 1, 1976–January 27, 1977, and the 199.8-inch season total were computed November 5, 2026 from our Neon copy of NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network–Daily dataset, for Buffalo Niagara International Airport (station USW00014733), with a quality-control filter applied to flagged readings. The death toll (~29), the 69 mph airport gust (75 mph at Niagara Falls), the 55-to-60-below wind chills, the note that much of the airport snow was existing lake-ice snow blown and redeposited, and the nine-county federal disaster declaration — the first ever for a snowstorm in the US — are from the National Weather Service Buffalo event history. The November 2014 and December 2022 Buffalo storms are referenced for context from NWS Buffalo and Erie County reporting; this page does not restate their figures.