You Want Snow? Head To Japan

Via Twitter: About five feet of snow atop
a northern Japan phone booth this week.

A lot of us don't think of Japan as particularly snowy. 

Our biases tilt toward what is most familiar, so maybe we think of relatively warm and wet Tokyo, where the average annual snowfall is just two inches.

Head north into some mountainous areas, though, and they really get blitzed by snow.

An example just hit in recent days. 

As meteorologist Matthew Cappucci with the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang writes, one town about 200 miles north of Tokyo reported 85 inches of new snow. That's seven feet of snow in one storm! 

Shovel that out of your driveway, folks. 

Epic snowstorms like this are actually pretty common in northern Japan.  It's basically lake effect snow, except it's the Sea of Japan that helps create the snow. 

We're familiar with lake effect snows from the Great Lakes.  Cold winds often blow across the relatively warm waters of those lakes.  The cold air can then take up the moisture from the lakes and dump it as heavy snows in places like Buffalo, Cleveland or more extensively in New York's Tug Hill Plateau. 

It works the same way in Japan.  Cold  west and northwest winds blow off the chilly mainland of China and Russia. Those winds cross the tepid waters of the Sea of Japan, and pick up boatloads of moisture. Those now moisture laden, cold winds then smack into the hills and mountains of northern Japan, and you get snowstorms you measure in feet, not inches. 

As Cappucci notes, the recent snows in Japan were more widespread and heavier than usual due to unusually sharp cold air and oddly strong storms that really bolstered those west and northwest winds. 

Japan was sandwiched between record breaking high pressure in Mongolia with its packet of frigid an a Pacific Ocean storm that eventually brought record low pressure to Alaska. T

That was a perfect setup for those intense snows. It created strong, frigid west winds that blew across the Sea of Japan. The rest is snow drifts and history.

Even when there's not such a perfect setup for northern Japan snows, frequent sea-effect snows over the course of a winter really pile up.

For instance, on February 21, 2013, there was 17 feet of snow on the ground in one northern Japan town. Up in the mountains, above the elevation where people live,  There's been as much as 38 feet of snow on the ground at a 4,000 foot above sea level in an area known as the Japanese Alps, as noted by Christopher Burt.

In the early spring, tourists flock to high mountain passes in northern Japan as tour buses navigate roads at the base of what looks like snow canyons.  The snow depth is sometimes three or four times the height of the tour buses on the roads. 

All this makes the 42 inches of snow in southern Vermont last month seem like just a flurry. 

By the way, just a flurry is all you'll get in Vermont for the next several days. That atmospheric traffic jam I told you about yesterday is still in place, leaving us with cloudy skies, freezing fog this morning, and scattered flurries today through Wednesday.