Q&A: Is there a relationship between first snow date and total snowfall for the season?

SHORT ANSWER: No.

LONGER ANSWER: You’d be forgiven to think that if the snow is late in any particular year, then we’d get less snow over the course of the season. However, this isn’t the case. The figure below shows the relationship between date of first snowfall and total snowfall for a given year. There’s no discernible relationship.

There’s an important caveat though: some ‘average’ snowfall datapoints are not very reliable, because they’re based on just one year’s snowfall data. That is, some first snowfall dates have only occurred once during the time period available (1952-2017). October the 8th, for instance – the first snowfall has only occurred once on that date. Other dates have seen multiple occurrences of first snow over the years – November the 4th is the ‘most popular’ date for the first snowfall, having experienced the first snowfall six times.

Therefore, use the ‘No. of Datapoints’ filter to filter out that data that only has one year’s worth of snowfall data.