Granite Girl:
No, it isn't the coldest areas that get the most snow. Ya gotta remember that snow is water, and that water has to come from somewhere. The colder the air, the less moisture it can contain, and the dryer it is.
The worst snowfalls happen wherever warm moist air from the south mixes with cold Arctic air from the north, or where warm moist air cools as it rises to go over a mountain range. So, you get the worst snow on the west side of the Rockies when warm moist air from the Pacific Ocean rises and cools. (In your ski resorts on the west side of the Rockies, you can have a 5 or 6 foot dump of snow, easy.) And, you can get some real heavy snow falls along the East coast of the continent. Hurricanes that form off the west coast of Africa will often take a path that steers them right along the US eastern seaboard. As long as they don't run into a real cold air mass, then all they do is give you lots of wind and rain. The Canadian Maritime provinces of Newfoundland (which includes Labrador), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island kinda stick out from the continent into the path of those hurricanes. The hurricanes are very much weaker by the time they get up here, but when they mix with really cold air from the north, then you can get either wind with super heavy rain or real bad blizzards.
That picture of the construction equipment clearing a 10 foot snow dump on a highway made it onto that Government of Canada web page because that much snow is a freak occurance even for us, and it was undoubtedly the result of a hurricane from the south mixing with a cold arctic air mass. Typically, it's only a foot or two most times, and we can deal with the situation with ordinary snow plows and snow blowers. But, during my lifetime, I recall playing with my two sisters after a bad blizzard when I was only about 6 or 7 years old. We couldn't get out of our house because the snow had drifted up against the sides where both the front and back doors were. So, my dad ended up using a cooking pot to scoop snow away from the front door so we could open it. After that, me and my two sisters went out to play in the snow. We could walk up the snow drift onto the roof of our house and then jump off the roof on the other side of the house into the snow. My dad didn't even clear the snow away from the back door that year; we just waited for it to melt because that blizzard occured in March, anyway. It would melt in April and May.
But, those are the kinds of blizzards that only happened once every 30 or 40 years; they're not at all common. We call them "Colorado Clippers" because they're caused by warm air masses from the Gulf of Mexico going up the middle of the US (on the east side of the Rockies and mixing with cold air from the North over the Dakotas and the Canadian prairies. When you get lots of warm wet air mixing with bitterly cold air from the north, that's when you get an awful lot of snow. You guys just don't have enough really cold air down there to make for heavy snowfalls. You've got the warm moist air, but not the cold air you need to make good snow.
(sp?) It's all too confusing to me. That kind of stuff only happens around here every 20-30 years also. That blizzard I was talking about was the famous Blizzard of '78 around here. I don't think my sisters & I jumped off the roof, but we probably could've. And I have 2 boys (2 & 5) now who would love that!
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