Regions of New York

Long Island is 118 miles of barrier beach and moraine sticking out into the Atlantic, and it is the most hurricane-exposed ground in the Northeast — the 1938 Long Island Express came ashore here and Sandy put the South Shore under. The ocean also runs the daily forecast: the sea breeze holds the beaches twenty degrees below the Pine Barrens in July, and the water keeps Montauk out of the snow that buries Nassau.

The valley is where New York's winter is decided. The Hudson channels cold air south while the ocean pushes warm air north, so the rain–snow line spends most of the season somewhere between Yonkers and Kingston, and an inch either way is the difference between rain in Tarrytown and a foot in the Catskills. The same mountains that make the snow made Irene's flood in 2011 — the Esopus and the Schoharie came off them all at once.

Albany sits where the Hudson meets the Mohawk, which is also where three storm tracks meet: coastal lows up the Hudson, Great Lakes lows through the Mohawk gap, and Canadian cold straight down the Champlain corridor. The gap funnels wind hard enough to matter on its own, and the Schoharie and the Mohawk flood spectacularly — Irene took the Schoharie Valley apart in a single afternoon.

This is the coldest and the snowiest corner of the eastern United States. Tug Hill, just east of Lake Ontario, takes more snow than anywhere else east of the Rockies — 300 inches in a good winter, and 77 inches in a single storm at Montague in 1997. Inside the park the Adirondack hollows run to 40 below on a clear February night, and Saranac Lake and Old Forge trade the state's cold record between them most years.

Syracuse is the snowiest large city in the United States and it is not close — about 125 inches a year, off a lake that stays open most of the winter. Oswego, thirty-five miles north, takes half again as much. The same lake that buries them keeps the Finger Lakes' vineyards alive, and south of the city the valleys hold fog and cold air long after Syracuse has cleared.

The Southern Tier is river country in a place that gets a lot of rain: the Susquehanna and the Chemung drain the Catskills and the Alleghenies straight through the middle of it. Agnes in 1972 and Lee in 2011 both put Binghamton and Elmira under, and Lee remains the flood of record on the Susquehanna. It is also cloudy — Binghamton is among the least sunny cities in the country.

The lake plain is the mildest ground in upstate New York and the deep glacial lakes behind it are the reason — they hold enough heat to keep the frost off the vineyards on Seneca and Cayuga into November, which is why the wine is here. Lake Ontario cuts both ways: it takes the edge off the cold and then puts a hundred inches of lake-effect snow on Rochester in a bad winter.

Buffalo's snow is not evenly shared and the city knows it: a lake-effect band off Erie can drop seven feet on the Southtowns while the Northtowns stay dry, which is what November 2014 and the Christmas blizzard of 2022 both did. Lake Erie is shallow enough to freeze, so the machine shuts off in midwinter and restarts in the thaw — and the same lake makes the Chautauqua grape belt the largest Concord planting in the world.