Which Ski Resort Gets the Most Snow in the World?

Ask this question online and you get opinions. Someone says Niseko. Someone says Alta. Someone mentions Mt Baker’s 1999 record. What you rarely get is a number that lets you compare two resorts on the same terms.

So we measured all of them.

The answer, and the asterisk on it

On snowfall alone it is FONNA Glacier in Norway, at 783 cm a season.

FONNA is shut for all of it. The road to the glacier vanishes under the winter snowpack and cannot be cleared, so the ski area opens in May and runs to September. It is one of a small number of ski areas on earth that operate only in summer, and the reason is that the winter buries them (Powderhounds, SnowBrains).

Second is Okutadami Maruyama, in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, at 765 cm — and it too is shut for most of the winter.

You have almost certainly never heard of it. It has one chairlift area, sits at 685–1,160 m, and its access road is buried through the depth of the winter. It opens properly in spring, when the snowpack is deep enough that the road can be cleared but the snow is still falling.

So the world’s two snowiest ski areas are both, in their different ways, too snowy to open in the snow. That is not a coincidence about these two places. It is what the top of this list looks like.

The top ten

#	Resort	Country	Snowfall
1	FONNA Glacier	🇳🇴 Norway	783 cm
2	Okutadami Maruyama	🇯🇵 Japan	765 cm
3	Nevados de Chillán	🇨🇱 Chile	752 cm
4	Shames Mountain	🇨🇦 Canada	730 cm
5	Muikamachi Hakkaisan	🇯🇵 Japan	728 cm
=6	Iwappara	🇯🇵 Japan	712 cm
=6	Nakazato Snow Wood	🇯🇵 Japan	712 cm
=6	Yuzawa Nakazato	🇯🇵 Japan	712 cm
=6	Yuzawa Park	🇯🇵 Japan	712 cm
10	Ski Callaghan	🇨🇦 Canada	710 cm

Six of the top ten are in Japan, and all six are in one prefecture: Niigata. The four that are not are a Norwegian glacier, a Chilean volcano and two Canadian areas in British Columbia.

Those four resorts tied at 6th are not a coincidence and not an error. They sit within 5 km of each other in the Yuzawa valley, inside the same cell of the weather model we used. The data cannot separate them, so we do not pretend it can. More on that below.

Forty-six of the top hundred are Japanese

That is the number that surprised us. Not that Japan ranks well, since everyone knows Japan gets snow, but the depth of it. Japan does not have one or two freak resorts. It has forty-six in the world’s top hundred.

Compare the best each country has to offer:

Country	Its snowiest resort	World rank	Japanese resorts that beat it
🇳🇴 Norway	FONNA Glacier	1	—
🇯🇵 Japan	Okutadami Maruyama	2	—
🇨🇱 Chile	Nevados de Chillán	3	1
🇨🇦 Canada	Shames Mountain	4	1
🇺🇸 United States	Mt Baker	=26	20
🇦🇷 Argentina	Caviahue	47	30
🇫🇷 France	Chamonix	=87	44
🇨🇭 Switzerland	Snow Park	=140	66
🇮🇹 Italy	La Thuile	164	75
🇳🇿 New Zealand	Invincible Snowfields	=190	80
🇦🇹 Austria	Diedamskopf	=233	92
🇦🇺 Australia	Charlotte Pass	=966	238

Read the right-hand column slowly. 92 Japanese ski areas get more snow than the snowiest resort in Austria. 238 of them, roughly six in ten of every ski area in Japan, get more snow than the snowiest resort in Australia.

Austria has world-class skiing. This is not an argument about which country is better to ski in; terrain, lifts, culture and price all matter. It is only a statement about how much snow falls out of the sky.

Why Niigata and not Hokkaido?

Niseko’s reputation is deserved, and Hokkaido’s snow is famously dry. But the raw quantity record belongs to the Sea of Japan coast of Honshu, and the mechanism explains why.

Cold air leaves Siberia. It crosses the Sea of Japan, which stays relatively warm through winter. In a few hundred kilometres that air picks up an enormous load of moisture. Then it hits the mountain spine of Honshu and has nowhere to go but up, and everything it collected falls as snow.

What makes Japan unusual is the geometry. In most of the world, the moisture source and the mountains are far apart. Here the sea and 2,000 m peaks sit within tens of kilometres of each other. The result is a snowfall machine that runs all winter.

Hokkaido is colder, so its snow is lighter and drier, which is what people mean by “Japow”. Niigata and Nagano are slightly warmer and get more of it by volume.

How we measured this

Every resort was measured identically:

• Daily snowfall summed across each of twelve winters (2014/15 to 2025/26 in the north, 2015 to 2026 in the south), then averaged per season. We deliberately avoid thirty-year normals: snowfall patterns are shifting, and old averages describe a climate that no longer exists.
• Winter defined per hemisphere: December–March in the north, June–September in the south. Without that split, southern resorts would be measured during their summer and would rank at zero. Getting this right is why Las Leñas in Argentina appears joint 97th in the world rather than at the bottom.
• Source: Open-Meteo historical data, based on the ERA5 reanalysis.

We can check the model against weather stations only in Japan. The top of this list is decided by gaps wide enough to survive that. How we check the model →

Three things this data cannot do

It cannot separate neighbours. ERA5 works on a grid roughly 10–30 km across. Every ski area in the Yuzawa valley falls inside one cell and therefore gets one number. That is why four resorts tie for sixth. Anyone claiming Iwappara out-snows Yuzawa Nakazato is reading precision that does not exist.

It cannot resolve small gaps. Even twelve winters leave real uncertainty. Year-to-year swings are large — Okutadami Maruyama itself ranged from 381 cm to 989 cm across the twelve. In 382 of Japan’s 397 ski areas the gap between the best and the worst winter is more than half the average. The 9% gap between first place and the four tied at sixth is well inside that noise.

It cannot give you exact depths. Grid elevation is not slope elevation, so the absolute figures carry error. Read 765 cm as “roughly eight metres”.

What it can do is compare regions, and there the signal is unmistakable. Niigata’s 48 ski areas average 554 cm; Toyama’s four average 410 cm; Austria’s best manages 368 cm. Those gaps are far larger than any of the errors above.

Resort-reported snowfall totals, by contrast, are not comparable at all. Every resort measures differently, at a different altitude, with different rounding, and with an obvious incentive to round up. Ours are comparable only because all 3,069 went through one identical process.

See the full ranking

The complete list runs to 300 places, with every Japanese entry linking through to live snow depth, forecasts, webcams and places to stay.

Most of the resorts near the top are places you have never heard of. That is not an accident — the snowiest places in Japan are frequently the least known ones, because deep snow and good marketing are unrelated.

Revision history

• 29 September 2026. Moved from three winters to twelve. FONNA Glacier moved ahead of Okutadami Maruyama, Nevados de Chillán fell from 2nd to 3rd, and Japan’s share of the top hundred fell from 61 to 46.