Climate of Buffalo

Buffalo has an exaggerated reputation for severe weather. In fact, Buffalo’s summers are the sunniest and driest of any major city in the Northeast, but still receive enough rain for lush, green vegetation and good gardening conditions. Buffalo summers also are temperate with comparatively short humid spells. Many residents have backyard pools and air conditioners, a fact that surprises some visitors.

The occasionally heavy snowfall in the region is caused by below-freezing winds blowing over the warmer water of Lake Erie. This is the famous lake effect. The resulting snowbelts are often only ten or fifteen miles wide, with sunny skies in one spot and raging flurries a mile or two away. Lake Erie is much shallower than the other Great Lakes, and portions usually freeze over in the winter. When Erie ices over, the lake effect ends and snowfall is light to moderate.

Winters are longer than in other areas, and due to the lake effect, Buffalo averages more snowfall than most northern cities. Winters, however, are not extremely cold and include frequent thaws and rain. Hilly regions south of the city receive about twice as much snow as Buffalo proper, and provide some of the best winter recreation centers in the northeastern US.

The best known snow storm in Buffalo history was the Blizzard of ‘77. Severe storms also occurred on November 20, 2000 and at Christmas, 2001. The city is a competitor for Upstate New York’s annual Golden Snowball Award, but for several years has lost out to Rochester or Syracuse, which have recently received more snow than Buffalo.

Obscured by the attention given to winter snowstorms is the fact that Buffalo benefits from the other lake effect, namely free, natural “air conditioning” from Lake Erie. Its summers are often delightful, with gentle southwest breezes off the Lake tempering the warmest days. Buffalo’s official weather station has never recorded a temperature exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, one of only three major US city weather stations with this distinction (the other two are Miami, Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii).

Sailing, waterskiing, swimming, and gardening are popular summer pastimes, as well as sport fishing, which has at its disposal one of the greatest varieties of fresh-water fish in the nation, in the Niagara River, Lake Erie, and tributary streams. These include walleye, perch, large- and small-mouth bass, trout and steelhead, northern pike, muskellunge, and imported salmon.