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Central Missouri and Kansas usually have at least two months of ground cover. Which I think qualifies as "most" of the three-month winter. It may be patchy in between snowfalls, or some years nearly absent, but those would be abnormal.
It is crazy how different stats are for Canada and northern US than for Europe. I checked out latitudes and northern Germany and northern Poland are clearly far more north than where majority of canadians live, not to mention northern americans and yet there is not even close of an amount of snow here that you have there. You truly have four seasons weather where summer is summer and winter is winter. Here it seems there is just long autumn and long spring. Too cold in summer and too warm in winter.
In Germany and Poland, you go south to go snow skiing in the winter.
In Germany and Poland, you go south to go snow skiing in the winter.
That’s altitude, not latitude. You can ski in the Sierra Nevadas in southern Spain and golf/sail on the same day. The Italian Riviera to the Mont Blanc tunnel is a couple hour drive.
I have lots of Bay Area friends with cabins at Tahoe who ski every weekend. Friends in Truckee have to board up their ground floor windows all winter and the golf course they live on still has some snow patches on July 1. I have LA friends with condos at Mammoth. Ski Santa Fe is a fun little ski area.
As a Canadian you're usually living near the US border. Currently, I'm about 70km from the Minnesota border. We already had two snowfalls this year, although they were just a couple cm and the snow only lasted a few hours before melting. There's snow on the ground for most of November though, and for the past 3 winters of living here, I've yet to see a single day in December to March when there wasn't snow cover. The snow cover usually lasts into April, this year, the snow in the city lasted until late April on the lawns (mid May for some of the bigger piles made by snowplows) and there were areas in the woods in and hills that still had 20-30 cm in mid-late April, and a few small patches into mid-late May.
The climate on the US side of the border in NE Minnesota is essentially identical. So the parts of the US around Lake Superior have 4-6 months of snow cover. Probably Minneapolis, Green Bay, Traverse City and Fargo also have snow on the ground pretty consistently.
I've also lived in Southern Ontario. Over there, it depends where you are relative to the lakes, which generate snowbelts as well as a moderating effect. The shore of Lake Ontario from Toronto to Hamilton gets little snowbelt precipitation, but has a moderating effect, so there can be decently 10-20cm snowfalls any time from December to March, but it's rare for snow to last more than 2-3 weeks. I would say there's about 50-60 days of snow cover there. But in Waterloo, it's 1-2 degrees colder with a bit more snowbelt precipitation, so there it's already more like 80 days of snow cover. In Barrie it's a bit colder still with more snowbelts, so maybe 90 days?
This map basically answers your question.
Based off that map, among the bigger regional cities, looks like roughly
Duluth, MN: 130 days
Boise, ID: 130 days
Salt Lake City, UT: 120 days
Burlington, VT: 120 days
Fargo, ND: 100 days
Minneapolis, MN: 100 days
Bozeman, MT: 100 days
Manchester, NH: 90 days
Syracuse, NY: 90 days
Albany, NY: 90 days
Green Bay, WI: 85 days
Portland, ME: 80 days
Buffalo, NY: 80 days
Denver, CO: 75 days
Cheyenne, WY: 70 days
Reno, NV: 70 days
Rochester, NY: 70 days
Springfield, MA: 70 days
Madison, WI: 70 days
Grand Rapids, MI: 70 days
Sioux Falls, SD: 70 days
Milwaukee, WI: 65 days
Scranton, PA: 60 days
Rapid City, SD: 60 days
Cleveland, OH: 55 days
Davenport, IA: 50 days
Des Moines, IA: 50 days
Spokane, WA: 50 days
Boston, MA: 45 days
Detroit, MI: 45 days
Chicago, IL: 45 days
Omaha, NE: 40 days
Pittsburgh, PA: 40 days
Columbus, OH: 30 days
New York City, NY: 25 days
Kansas City, MO: 25 days
Santa Fe, NM: 25 days
Philadelphia, PA: 20 days
St. Louis, MO: 20 days
The Western cities (Bozeman, Reno, Salt Lake, Denver, Boise, Spokane, Cheyenne, Santa Fe) are hard to estimate from this map though since it's a very zoomed out map and there's going to be very significant differences depending on which side of a mountain they're on or what the exact elevation is. Someone more familiar with those cities would have to confirm what they're like.
The areas with extremely long lasting snow (>100 days) in the eastern half of the country mostly have small cities, Duluth and Burlington aren't that big, and there's also Watertown, Bangor, Grand Forks, Minot, Wausau, Marquette, Traverse City and others but those are mostly towns or small cities. I would consider 50-100 days to still be a significant length of snow cover though, and that includes some relatively large cities like Buffalo, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the northern or more inland parts of the Boston area. Chicago and Detroit get decent snow cover too. New York City and Philadelphia not so much, there will be a few days here and there, maybe even a week or two, but there are more snow-free days during the winter than days with snow. The southern half of the US, the West Coast and the East Coast up to Baltimore get very little snow cover or none at all.
Can definitely attest to this for Duluth. Duluth has a great combination of hyper snow and cold. All other places are either cold and not as snowy, snowy but not as cold, or really not a well developed city (maybe town or a very small incorporated city). It is an awesome place if you love snow and cold.
Being from MN, I can attest that this region's snowfall sticks around after it falls. I recently saw a pic from this July that showed 1 parking lot in the Twin Cities that had a smidgen of snow left (covered/insulted in dirt, left from a parking lot giant snowpile mind you). the average high temp in the coldest month in the Twin Cities is 19, with a low of 4. And, in a way, the cold begets cold. That is, snow coverage keeps temps cooler, enabling more snow. The flipside to this is that many of the bitter cold regions lack the moisture to get consistent, huge snowfalls. While they can happen, MN usually gets little 4 inch snow falls, vs. say the Northeast or the Rockies which can get more large 12"+ events
So definitely:
N dakota
S Dakota
MN
WI
Northern IA
Michigan
Upstate NY
Vermont
NH
Maine
Also include Mountainous regions of the more Northern states, like NY, Montana, WY, CO, etc.
I don't think it's reasonable to try and compare the US to European weather. The size difference alone makes that jut not realistic.
If you had to simplify to a grade school degree, you could say the northern 1/3 definitely gets snow in winter and that would normally be from November to June. And, some areas farther south also get snow, and all of these areas can get more snow than other areas.
In other words, good luck generalizing without looking up statistics.
November through June? You got the first part right... but aside from a mountain peak... where is there snow til June?
Y'all have some weird perception of seasons down in California lol.
Going into my fourth winter in Western Wyoming I will say that we get snow that sticks on the ground from sometime in November until March/April. We have already had a couple of snow storms so far this year, but nothing has stuck, and we had snow falling all the way into the beginning of June this year as well..
So definitely:
N dakota
S Dakota
MN
WI
Northern IA
Michigan
Upstate NY
Vermont
NH
Maine
Also include Mountainous regions of the more Northern states, like NY, Montana, WY, CO, etc.
In post #4, we got:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tusco
Almost anywhere that's above Interstate 90.
Western Massachusetts is certainly on the list. Norman Rockwell did all those snowy Christmas illustrations in Stockbridge, Mass after he moved from Vermont. I presume anything next to a Great Lake is on the list so northern Ohio, northern Indiana, northern Illinois.
Western Massachusetts is certainly on the list. Norman Rockwell did all those snowy Christmas illustrations in Stockbridge, Mass after he moved from Vermont. I presume anything next to a Great Lake is on the list so northern Ohio, northern Indiana, northern Illinois.
If they're not down-wind from the Great Lakes, maybe not so much, like Toledo, Chicago or Fort Wayne will get some snow that occasionally sticks around, but probably have quite a lot of snow free periods in the winter as well.
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