Snow Quality in Japan, Ranked

Showing the top 200. The national medians are -3.3°C, 17% rain days and 14% days over 5 cm.

The two orderings agree through the middle and swap at the extremes. These are simply the largest gaps in each direction.

Medians. Only prefectures with four or more measured ski areas.

Daily snowfall, precipitation, temperature and wind for December to March across the three most recent completed seasons — 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26 — from Open-Meteo historical data on the ERA5 reanalysis.

A snowing day records 1 cm or more of snowfall; a rain day records 1 mm or more of rain. Temperature and wind are read only on snowing days: a whole-winter average would mix in clear cold days that have nothing to do with what the snow is like.

Temperatures are corrected from the grid cell's elevation to each ski area's own mid-elevation at 6.5°C per kilometre.

The score multiplies dryness by frequency and then applies the rain and wind penalties. Multiplying rather than adding is deliberate — one strong component should not be able to cover for a weak one. A place that is bitterly cold but rarely snows is not good, and neither is one that snows every day at 0°C.

The weights and thresholds are our judgement, not a measurement. Nothing in the physics says dryness should scale to zero at +2°C and full at −12°C, or that rain should cost at most 65%. We chose those numbers, and reasonable people would choose differently, and the order would shift. What the ranking can carry is that all 397 went through one identical calculation.

Rain and frequency only resolve to a valley. ERA5 runs on a 10–30 km grid, so the ten Shiga Kogen areas return an identical rain-day share. Temperature separates them because it is corrected for elevation; the precipitation columns treat them as one place.

The "days over 5 cm" column is counted from the same estimates as our snowfall figures. How much snow falls really is excluded, as the lead says. How often it falls is not, and that comes from the same source — and how close that source runs varies by region. Against 63 Japan Meteorological Agency stations it returns 77% of measured snowfall in Hokuriku and Shinetsu, and 44% in Kinki and Chugoku. Undercount the snowy days and the quality rank falls with them.

Treat western Japan's positions here with particular care. Its 39 ski areas sit at a median of 350th, the lowest of any region in the country. It is also the region where these estimates are furthest from the ground, as above. Whether those positions reflect the snow or the measurement is not something we can separate with what we hold. Comparisons within one region are firmer than comparisons across them.

Three winters. Enough to separate a −11°C place from a −4°C place, not enough to argue about tenths.

This is not how good the skiing is. Aspect, tree spacing, grooming policy and lift layout are not in it. This measures what arrives from the sky.