No snow yet. Snow depth and the seven-day outlook appear once snow is on the ground or forecast.
Typical snowfall
189cm
A weather-model figure, worked out the same way for every ski area, and lower than what actually falls. Use it to compare ski areas, not against the resort’s own totals. How we measure →
Elevation
2,048–2,186 m
Across
1.2 km
We do not show a snow depth here. The weather model we use reports snow lying on the ground — it knows nothing about grooming or snowmaking, and it is not the base depth a ski area publishes. In Japan we can check our figures against 234 weather stations. Outside Japan there is nothing to check them against, so we do not print a number we have not verified.
Howelson Hill Ski Area, in United States, runs from 2,048 m at the base to 2,186 m at the top. Its mapped area is about 1.2 km across, with 19 marked runs and 4 lifts (about 6.6 km of piste in all).
Over the last twelve winters the ERA5 weather model gives it 189 cm of snowfall a season, 1,248th (tied) of 3,069 worldwide and 99th in the United States. Its winters are fairly steady; even the leanest, 2014/15 (138 cm), reached 73% of the average. December brings as much snow as January here (53 and 46 cm on average).
How much snow it gets
Modelled from weather data the same way at all 3,069 ski areas we cover. These are not the resort’s own published figures.
Seasonal snowfall
189cm
per season
Worst of 12 winters
138cm
The middle winter of the 12: 183 cm. The best: 263 cm.
World rank
1248
of 3,069 worldwide
Rank in country
99
of 534 in United States
Elevation rank
118
Highest to lowest, of 534 in United States. The centre point sits at 2,070 m, 1,542 m above the national median.
Compared with what is nearby
Within 50 km in a straight line. Ski areas in the same weather-model cell (about 30 km across) get the same figure.
The most snow falls in December. March brings 93% of January’s snowfall. That is a gentler fall than the median for ski areas in the United States (85%). In amount, March brings 43 cm, more than the median of 30 cm.
53cmDec
46cmJan
47cmFeb
43cmMar
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters
Winter by winter
Across the 12 winters measured, the average is 189 cm, and 6 of them fell short of it. The leanest was 2014/15 with 138 cm; the biggest was 2022/23 with 263 cm (1.9 times as much). For 33% of the 534 ski areas in the United States the leanest winter was 2015/16; here it was a different one.
Niseko is 526th in the world for snowfall. Zermatt is 554th, Jackson Hole 924th, Aspen 1,201st. Measured identically across 3,069 ski areas, the names everyone books and the places it actually snows turn out to be two different lists.