Syracuse closed the 2025-26 season with 143.1 inches of snow, beating Rochester by 29 inches for a second straight Golden Snowball title. The winter included a record 24.2 inch calendar day on December 30 and the fourth snowiest December ever measured here. The Data Desk breaks down the standings, the lake science, the city’s snow budget, and what warming means for the crown.
The books are closed on the 2025-26 snow season, and the verdict is emphatic: Syracuse measured 143.1 inches of snow at Hancock International Airport, its highest seasonal total in eight years and its 16th snowiest winter since consistent record keeping began at the airport in the late 1940s. That total, tracked by the National Weather Service and compiled at goldensnowball.com, ran 15.3 inches above the city’s 127.8 inch long-term average and left every rival in upstate New York buried in second place or worse.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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Rochester finished with 114.1 inches, Buffalo with 92.5, Binghamton with 75.8 and Albany with 58.4. That means the Golden Snowball Award, the five-city trophy that has become upstate New York’s favorite meteorological grudge match, stays on the shelf at Syracuse City Hall for a second consecutive year. Syracuse also took the 2024-25 crown with 115.4 inches, reclaiming the trophy after Buffalo held it for three straight seasons.
The season will be remembered for one day above all: December 30, 2025, when a ferocious lake effect band parked over the city and dropped 24.2 inches in a single calendar day. WSYR NewsChannel 9 reported that the total now stands as the snowiest calendar day officially on the Syracuse books, after a Storm Team weather watcher flagged discrepancies in the old 34.0 inch mark from February 15, 1946, and the National Weather Service, rechecking its paper records, found only 2.4 inches actually fell that day.
The final standings: a 29 inch blowout
The Golden Snowball race was never close this year. By mid-February, Syracuse had already piled up 127.5 inches, essentially reaching its full-season average with six weeks of winter still on the calendar. Rochester, the runner-up, finished a distant 29 inches behind. Buffalo, whose international reputation for snow far outruns its actual numbers, ended the season more than 50 inches behind Syracuse and nearly three inches below its own 95.4 inch average.
Every city in the contest carries its own historical high-water mark, and the final standings show how far this season sat from the extremes. Syracuse’s 192.1 inch record from 1992-93 still towers over everything. Buffalo’s record of 199.4 inches, set during the infamous blizzard winter of 1976-77, remains the highest single-season total among the five cities. Rochester’s record is 161.7 inches from 1959-60, Binghamton’s is 135.2 inches from 2016-17, and Albany’s is 112.5 inches from 1970-71, all per the historical tables at goldensnowball.com.
Fifty titles and counting
The Golden Snowball began as an inside joke among National Weather Service forecasters in the late 1970s, when the offices serving upstate cities started comparing seasonal totals after the crushing blizzard winter of 1976-77. When the Rochester and Syracuse weather offices closed in the mid-1990s, the contest went dormant, until a Syracuse-area weather enthusiast named Patrick DeCoursey revived it in the 2002-03 season with a website that has tracked every flake since.
Syracuse dominates the all-time ledger. By goldensnowball.com’s count, this season marks roughly the 50th time Syracuse has posted the highest total among the five cities since record keeping began in the late 1940s. No other city is close. The recent era has been more competitive: Buffalo ran off three straight titles from 2021-22 through 2023-24, including a 133.6 inch season in 2022-23 driven by two historic storms, and Binghamton stole crowns in 2016-17 (135.2 inches) and 2020-21 (105.0 inches). Rochester’s last win came in 2019-20 with 91.8 inches. Albany, the outlier at the eastern edge of lake effect range, has never won.
The trophy itself has a checkered social life. Buffalo’s mayor declined to accept it after the 2018-19 season, according to the award’s Wikipedia history, while Syracuse mayors have generally embraced it as a point of civic pride. The unofficial slogan attached to the contest doubles as a warning label: this is the one championship nobody trains for.
The machine behind the snow: Lake Ontario
Syracuse’s standing as the snowiest large city in the United States, a title it holds among cities with populations over 100,000 based on NOAA climate normals, comes down to geography. The city sits roughly 35 miles southeast of Lake Ontario, squarely in the delivery zone for lake effect snow.
The mechanics are simple and relentless. In late fall and winter, cold Arctic air pours across the lake from the west and northwest. Lake Ontario is deep, with a mean depth of about 283 feet, so unlike shallower Lake Erie it almost never freezes over. That open water stays warmer than the air crossing it, feeding heat and moisture into the lowest layer of the atmosphere. The moistened air rises, condenses and organizes into narrow bands of intense snowfall that come ashore on the lake’s southeastern and eastern flanks.
The Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments program at the University of Michigan notes that the terrain east and southeast of Lake Ontario routinely records daily snowfall totals higher than anywhere else in the United States. The Tug Hill Plateau, northeast of Syracuse, regularly clears 200 inches a season. Syracuse catches the southern edge of that firehose, which is why the city averages 127.8 inches while Albany, just 130 miles east and out of the lake’s reach, averages 59.2.
December 30 was the textbook case. A single band locked in over Onondaga County and produced the 24.2 inch calendar day. December 2025 as a whole delivered 60.8 inches, double the normal December total and the fourth snowiest December on record, with an average temperature of 26.2 degrees, 4.2 degrees below normal, according to WSYR’s end-of-month climate summary.
What it costs: plows, salt and millions
Winning the Golden Snowball is not free. The City of Syracuse budgeted $4.1 million for snow and ice control in the 2023-24 fiscal year, an increase of roughly $1.2 million over 2022 levels, according to budget figures reported by CNY Central. The city typically burns through about 18,000 tons of road salt in a season, a fitting line item for a place nicknamed the Salt City for the brine springs that built its 19th century economy.
The fleet has been growing for years. Syracuse now runs 26 plows, and in December 2025 the city unveiled three new ones, each costing about $250,000 and weighing roughly 60,000 pounds when loaded with salt. Per city tradition, residents voted on the names: Syracuse Salt-Shaker, Snow Big Deal, and You’re Killing Me Squalls.
Sidewalks are a separate and thornier budget line. The city’s supplemental sidewalk snow removal program spent its initial $500,000 allocation by early February 2025, forcing the Common Council to approve another half million dollars mid-season, WAER reported. The city later fired one sidewalk contractor, Kimble and Kimble, over performance problems and rehired its previous vendor. In a 143 inch winter, every one of those dollars worked overtime.
The warming paradox: more snow now, less later
Here is the counterintuitive part of Syracuse’s snow story: climate warming has so far been feeding the machine, not starving it. Peer-reviewed work published in the Journal of Climate by Adam Burnett and colleagues at Colgate University in 2003 found that lake effect snowfall increased across the Great Lakes snowbelts between 1931 and 2001, even as non-lake-effect areas showed no comparable trend. A 2009 study led by Kenneth Kunkel, applying stricter data quality standards, confirmed upward snowfall trends in the Lake Superior and Lake Michigan belts from 1927 to 2007.
The mechanism is the same one that makes the snow in the first place. Warmer winters mean warmer lake water and less ice. NOAA’s Climate.gov analysis of the research calls it the paradox of lake effect snow: open, warm water in December and January is jet fuel for snow bands, so a warming climate can temporarily boost totals. Modeling by Michael Notaro and colleagues in 2015 projected that heavy lake effect snowstorms become more frequent around Lake Superior through mid-century, while work by Steve Vavrus in 2013 showed that full ice cover essentially shuts lake effect precipitation down.
The catch is the back half of the century. The Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments program projects that as air temperatures keep climbing, a growing share of lake effect precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow, especially in early and late winter. In other words, Central New York’s snow machine is likely to run hot for another couple of decades, then begin converting blizzards into cold November rain. The Golden Snowball may eventually become a contest of memory as much as measurement. For now, the December 30 record day argues the machine is still very much on.
How this season stacks up historically
At 143.1 inches, 2025-26 lands 16th on the Syracuse list since the late 1940s and is the city’s biggest winter since 2017-18, when 153.6 inches fell. It sits nearly 50 inches short of the 1992-93 benchmark of 192.1 inches, a season inflated by the March 13-14, 1993 Storm of the Century, which dumped about 43 inches on Syracuse in roughly 36 hours and shut down Onondaga County for days.
The distribution this season was front-loaded. December’s 60.8 inches accounted for more than 40 percent of the seasonal total, and the mid-February milestone of 127.5 inches meant Syracuse effectively banked a full average season before Valentine’s Day. That pattern, a violent early winter followed by a quieter late season, is consistent with what lake effect researchers expect from warmer lakes: the biggest events cluster in early winter, when the water-to-air temperature gap is widest.
Where to track this
The 2026-27 race starts, officially, with the first measurable flake this fall. Snow totals for all five cities are measured by National Weather Service observers at each city’s airport and compiled daily in season at goldensnowball.com. NWS Binghamton (weather.gov/bgm) issues the official Syracuse climate reports, including daily and monthly snowfall summaries, and NWS Buffalo (weather.gov/buf) covers the Rochester and Buffalo numbers along with lake effect warnings for the Lake Ontario snowbelt. Great Lakes ice cover, the leading indicator for how hard the lake effect machine can run, is mapped daily each winter by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory at glerl.noaa.gov. CNY Signal will carry live totals, band tracking and plow coverage all winter.
