How Much Does Snowfall Change From One Winter to the Next? Country by Country

Nobody books a ski week for the average winter. You book one week, in one place, half a year before anyone knows what the weather will do, and then you get whatever that winter turns out to be.

So the useful question is not how much snow a place gets. It is how far the answer moves.

The spread, by country

We counted each of the last twelve winters at every Japanese ski area averaging 100 cm or more, and at up to 25 such ski areas in each other country, chosen by a fixed rule rather than by us. Divide each ski area’s best winter by its worst, and take the middle value for the country.

	Ski areas measured	Best winter ÷ worst
Canada	25	1.82
Finland	13	1.85
Sweden	25	1.99
Japan	376	2.34
Switzerland	25	2.35
Germany	25	2.61
Norway	25	2.73
Austria	25	2.82
France	25	2.95
Iran	19	3.04
United States	25	3.34
Argentina	13	3.69
Spain	25	3.90
New Zealand	24	4.21
Chile	10	4.57
Italy	25	4.63

A typical Italian ski area’s best winter of the twelve was more than four and a half times its worst. A typical Japanese one was a little over twice. Those are different propositions for someone committing to dates in August.

Japan is not the steadiest. Canada, Finland and Sweden all come out ahead of it — cold, continental, and in the Nordic cases comparatively dry. But Japan sits level with Switzerland and ahead of every other Alpine country, the United States, and everything in the southern hemisphere.

Italy swings hardest of all, at 4.6 times, with Chile just behind. Australia, where we could measure only six ski areas, came out wider still, at 6.5, but six ski areas are too few to place a country.

Italy sits at the top of the Alpine countries for the reason the Alps’ southern rim always does: its winter depends on how often low-pressure systems track across the Mediterranean rather than north of the range. When they do, it is a huge year. When they do not, there is very little.

Why three winters got this wrong

The earlier version had the same broad order at the top and bottom, but every number much narrower: Japan at 1.45, Italy at 2.07.

The three winters it used contained none of the really bad seasons of the last decade. In Japan, the worst winter of the twelve came in 2015/16 at 241 of 376 ski areas, and in 2019/20 at another 66. Neither was in the three-winter record. A short record does not just add noise at individual resorts — it can make an entire country look steady at once, because every ski area in it shares the same few winters.

That is also why the resort lists that used to be here are gone. The earlier version named White Pass in Washington as the steadiest ski area in the dataset, on three winters that fell between 518 and 529 cm. Three numbers that land close together look like a guarantee. They are not one.

How to use it

If your dates are fixed and cannot move, weight reliability over headline snowfall, and weight depth even more. A resort that loses half of a very deep winter can still leave more snow than one that loses a fifth of a thin one. We worked through that for Japan here.

If you can move your dates, the opposite holds. Variance is only a risk when you are locked in. If you can book late and go where it has snowed, a high-variance region is where the exceptional weeks come from.

Check how the resort you are considering varies, not just its country. Every ski area page on this site shows how its snowfall changes between winters.

How this was measured

Daily snowfall from the ERA5 reanalysis, summed on Japanese calendar days over each of the twelve most recent winters: December to March from 2014/15 to 2025/26 in the north, June to September from 2015 to 2026 in the south. Japan uses all 376 of its ski areas averaging at least 100 cm a season. Every other country uses up to 25 ski areas above the same line, picked by a fixed pseudo-random rule so that the selection is not ours; countries with fewer qualifying ski areas are measured in full. Countries with fewer than ten measured ski areas — China and Australia — are left out of the table.

A sample of 25 is enough to place a country, not to separate close neighbours. Japan at 2.34 and Switzerland at 2.35 are the same result. The differences this article rests on — Canada near 1.8, Japan near 2.3, Italy near 4.6 — are far wider than the sample can blur.

The model understates mountain snowfall everywhere. That matters for centimetre figures and not for these ratios, because a consistent understatement divides out.

Ski areas with a winter of zero snowfall are excluded, since dividing by zero produces no ratio.

Sources: Open-Meteo historical weather data, based on the ERA5 reanalysis (Copernicus Climate Change Service).

Revision history

• 13 September 2026. Rewritten on twelve winters. The three-winter version had Japan as the joint-steadiest ski country; Canada, Finland and Sweden turn out steadier, and Italy still swings about twice as wide as Japan. What went wrong.