GoldenSnowball.com - A Fun New York Snow Contest

As we all know, it has been a very quiet month snow-wise this December. In fact, the city with the most snow this month is Binghamton, with 6.7 inches. The least snowiest December among the five cities is Albany, with less than an inch. This got us thinking…what are the top 5 least snowy Decembers for each of the GSB cities? After a little bit of research, here they are!

Albany:
Trace (1928 and 1895)
0.3 (2006)
0.5 (1931)
0.6 (1943)

Binghamton:
4.0 (1994)
4.2 (2006)
4.7 (1957)
5.4 (1965)
6.2 (1998)

Buffalo:
1.1 (1891 and 1889)
1.7 (1943)
2.9 (1931)
3.4 (1896)

Rochester:
2.6 (1939 and 1928)
4.1 (1932)
4.3 (1936)
4.7 (1891)

Syracuse:
2.7 (1931)
2.8 (1947)
3.4 (1932)
5.2 (1924)
5.9 (1994)

As some of our readers probably know, when I did the seasonal snow rankings last Winter, I used the 1951-52 season as a starting point. That was to sort of make it an even playing field as that was the first season available with data for all five GSB cities. One of the reasons was to compare rankings by city (as an example: City A is having their 15th snowiest season, while City B is at their 26th). It wouldn’t be “fair” if one city’s records went back 50 years while another one went back 100 years or more. This time around, I decided to go with all available seasons. Since I’m not comparing each other’s rankings (that might come later) with each other, I believed this to be the way to go. As such, I should mention that the period of record can vary greatly city to city. Albany (1874), Buffalo (1871) and Rochester (1871) have a much earlier starting point than Binghamton (1951) and, to a lesser extent, Syracuse (1902).

By the way, with 4.2 inches of snow so far, Rochester could crack the top 5 of their least snowiest seasons! A half an inch or less is what it’ll take these last few days of the month.