Snowiest Places in the World by Annual Snowfall
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Snowiest Places in the World by Annual SnowfallSukayu Onsen, a hot-spring resort high in Japan's Hakkoda Mountains, is the snowiest inhabited place on Earth, buried under about 1,764 cm, nearly 18 metres, of snow a year. Among major cities, Aomori (792 cm) tops the world, followed by Sapporo (485 cm) and Toyama (363 cm), giving Japan a clean sweep of the top spots. The reason is a unique geography: frigid Siberian winds sweep across the relatively warm Sea of Japan, pick up huge amounts of moisture, then dump it as snow when they hit Japan's mountains. Outside Japan, Syracuse, New York (315 cm) is among the snowiest large cities, fed by lake-effect snow off the Great Lakes, the same mechanism on a smaller scale. The enormous gap between Sukayu Onsen and everywhere else shows how dramatically local terrain can amplify snowfall.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- AccuWeather / snowfall records
- Coverage
- 5 entities · 5 observations
- Measure
- Average Annual Snowfall (cm)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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