The Snowiest Cities and Places in America
Syracuse, New York is the snowiest major city in America, with a long-term NOAA normal near 128 inches of snow a year. But the truly buried places are smaller towns and mountain sites — and the numbers have quietly been falling. We ranked them from our archive of 139 million NOAA daily records.
“Snowiest city” has a clean answer and a messy one. The clean answer is Syracuse — it wins essentially every year among cities of any real size, and it isn't close. The messy part is that the snowiest places in America aren't cities at all. They're small Upper Peninsula towns and Cascade mountain stations that get two, three, even ten times what a big city sees.
To separate the two cleanly, we computed average snowfall from NOAA station data ourselves, summing each winter as a July-to-June snow season and averaging the last ten of them (2015–2024). Below: the snowiest big cities, the small towns that beat them, the mountain extremes in a class of their own, and the snowiest states.
The Snowiest Major US Cities
Cities of roughly 100,000+ people, ranked by average snowfall over the last ten winters (2015–2024) in our NOAA data. The upstate New York snow belt owns the top three.
| City | Avg snow / yr | Snowy days | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Syracuse, NY | 96" | 59 | Lake-effect snow off Lake Ontario — the snowiest large city in America. |
| Buffalo, NY | 89" | 50 | Lake Erie fetch loads the city when the lake is unfrozen. |
| Rochester, NY | 83" | 59 | Ontario lake-effect plus frequent clipper systems. |
| Anchorage, AK | 80" | 46 | High latitude and a long, cold season, moderated slightly by the sea. |
| Grand Rapids, MI | 67" | 45 | Lake Michigan lake-effect on west-Michigan winds. |
| Denver, CO | 50" | 25 | Upslope storms against the Front Range; melts fast between them. |
| Salt Lake City, UT | 42" | 30 | Great Salt Lake–effect bands and Wasatch upslope. |
Snowy days = days with more than a tenth of an inch of snow. Figures are recent-decade averages and run below the 1991–2020 NOAA normals (Syracuse ~128″, Buffalo ~95″, Rochester ~100″, Erie ~101″) — more on that below.
Snowier Still: The Small Towns
Drop the population filter and the leaderboard changes completely. These smaller cities and towns out-snow every big city in the country — same ten-winter method, same NOAA data.
| Place | Avg snow / yr | Snowy days | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sault Ste. Marie, MI | 132" | 78 | Eastern Upper Peninsula — hammered by both Superior and Huron lake-effect. |
| Caribou, ME | 124" | 67 | Far-northern Maine; long, deep winters with frequent nor’easters. |
| Flagstaff, AZ | 88" | 28 | Elevation — 7,000 ft in the mountains of northern Arizona. |
| Duluth, MN | 85" | 59 | Lake Superior lake-effect on the western tip of the lake. |
| Marquette, MI | 80" | 55 | Central Upper Peninsula, directly downwind of Lake Superior. |
| Binghamton, NY | 80" | 57 | Southern-tier New York uplands catch both lake-effect and coastal storms. |
| Erie, PA | 79" | 41 | On the shore of Lake Erie, in the heart of the snow belt. |
| Muskegon, MI | 64" | 41 | Lake Michigan shoreline lake-effect. |
Sault Ste. Marie averaged 78 snowy days a winter over the decade — more than one day in five, all season long.
The Snowiest Places Overall: Mountain Extremes
No town comes close to what the mountains get. Paradise, on Mount Rainier in Washington, averages roughly 640 inches — more than 50 feet — of snow a year, and once held the world seasonal record with 1,122 inches in 1971–72.
That record was broken just up the road. In the winter of 1998–99, the Mt. Baker Ski Area in Washington recorded 1,140 inches — 95 feet — of snow in a single season, which NOAA verified as the most ever measured anywhere on Earth in one year. These Cascade sites owe their totals to a perfect setup: moist Pacific air forced straight up over high terrain, wringing out snow relentlessly all winter.
The Snowiest States
“Snowiest state” is genuinely contested, because it depends on how you average a whole state. Rankings that use a straight statewide spatial average put Vermont first at about 89 inches a year, with Maine (~77″) close behind — a wall-to-wall snowy New England beats a state with a few intense pockets. Rankings weighted differently instead put Alaska or New Hampshire on top. Either way, the same names dominate the leaderboard:
Figures vary by source and method — NOAA-derived rankings put Vermont around 89″ on a spatial average but nearer 58″ on other methods. Browse the coldest and snowiest states in detail on our US weather records pages.
Why These Places Get Buried
Two mechanisms explain nearly every name on these lists:
- Lake-effect snow. Cold air crossing a relatively warm, unfrozen Great Lake soaks up moisture and dumps it downwind in narrow, ferocious bands. It is why Syracuse, Buffalo, the Michigan U.P. and Erie sit in a distinct “snow belt” while places a short drive inland get far less.
- Elevation and upslope. Air forced up over mountains cools and drops its moisture as snow. It is why Flagstaff out-snows most lakeside cities, and why the Cascades and Rockies dwarf everything — the higher and steeper the terrain in the storm track, the deeper the snow.
The Snow Belt Is Slowly Drying Out
Here is the finding that surprised us. Every big snow-belt city in our data has averaged less snow over the last decade than its long-term NOAA normal. Syracuse's 1991–2020 normal is about 128 inches; across 2015–2024 it managed roughly 96. Rochester and Buffalo show the same gap. That tracks with the well-documented trend of milder early winters and later lake freeze-up warming the Great Lakes region — the same warming we see in our analysis of US cities warming since 1990. Individual blockbuster winters still happen (Syracuse still cleared 116 inches in 2024–25), but the decade-long average is drifting down.
How We Computed This
City figures come from NOAA GHCN-Daily records in our database, using the primary long-record airport station for each city. Daily snowfall (stored in millimetres) was converted to inches (÷ 25.4), summed over each July–June snow season, and averaged across the ten seasons from 2015–16 to 2024–25. We validated the method against published NOAA normals for Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester before ranking. Long-term normals, statewide averages and mountain figures are from NOAA and the National Park Service, cited below.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the snowiest city in America?
Syracuse, New York — the snowiest major city, with a NOAA normal near 128 inches a year, driven by Lake Ontario lake-effect snow.
What is the snowiest place in the US?
Mountain sites: Paradise on Mount Rainier averages ~640 inches a year, and Mt. Baker, WA holds the world single-season record of 1,140 inches (1998–99).
What is the snowiest state?
Vermont, at about 89 inches a year on average, ahead of Maine and New Hampshire.
Why does Syracuse get so much snow?
It sits directly downwind of Lake Ontario, so cold air crossing the warmer lake generates heavy lake-effect snow bands over the city.
Keep Exploring
See the flip side in the rainiest states in America, read about the worst blizzards in US history, browse US weather records by state, or look up historical snowfall for any US city and date with our lookup tool.
Sources & Method
City averages: NOAA GHCN-Daily via our database (2015–2024 snow seasons). Long-term normals from NOAA NCEI, cross-checked against the Golden Snow Globe city rankings. Mountain figures from the National Park Service (Mount Rainier) and reporting on the Mt. Baker 1998–99 record; statewide averages from NOAA-derived rankings.