<p>I'm from the west coast and was just wondering: What are winters really like in New England? How much snow? Average temperature? I'm just not sure if I would be able to survive...</p>
<p>[Boston</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Boston - Wikipedia”>Boston - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I love New England winters, but maybe that’s just me because it just makes the city look so nice. Snow totals are rather high. Some storms can bring up to a foot of snow or in extreme cases like a few years ago three feet of snow. However sometimes it is only a dusting, but the average snow totals per storm I would say 3-6 inches. The average temperature I would say high 30s to mid 40s, but temperatures can reach as low as single digits on some very cold days.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, that’s weather report for Boston. Amherst in inland and the weather there is WAY worse. Last year temps were twenty below for weeks at a time. When twenty feet of snow fell in January, it was welcome respite from the eighty mile an hour winds!!!</p>
<p>Just kidding there BH. Unless you’re planning on NH, VT or Maine you should be fine. Yes it will snow. Yes it will be cold some days. But nowadays here in the northeast we plow the sidewalks and heat the buildings … really! (We do close the beaches in January and February though.)</p>
<p>As Mark Twain said (he lived in Hartford), “If you don’t like the weather in New England-----wait a minute.”</p>
<p>@eggspawn</p>
<p>lol…i feel the same exact way about how snow makes the city look awesome.</p>
<p>New England is a bid area. The weather at Fairfield (Connecticut) is very different than the weather they see at Bowdoin (Maine), so a great deal of the answer depends on where in New England you’re talking about. </p>
<p>That said, season changes are gradual, so you’ll have plenty of warning when it comes to buying warmer clothes. Frankly late Spring and early Fall are two of the most spectacular times of year. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.</p>
<p>Heh. I hate the winters up here (I grew up in the South), but I do survive. I had a number of friends who came from tropical climates and had never seen snow before, and survived.* And the summers, the horrible horrible June of this year notwithstanding, are usually gorgeous.</p>
<p>It varies some depending on where you are. It’s colder, and with more snow, inland, than on the coast.</p>
<p>*When I was a freshman, I went out to eat with a friend from Chicago, who was celebrating her birthday, and her roommate, who was from a warm part of India and had never seen snow prior to the previous week. It was December, there had been close to a foot of snow recently, and it was still snowing. The birthday girl just could NOT make up her mind about where she wanted to eat, so we spent 45 minutes walking around Boston in the snow, before we started telling her to pick a place, any place, we didn’t care as long as it was inside. The poor roommate looked like she wanted to die. I wasn’t too happy either. Both of us did, however, survive. The birthday girl, accustomed to Chicago winters, considered what we were walking in to be pretty mild and did not understand what was wrong with us.</p>
<p>i’ve actually found the weather really isn’t that bad compared to what we have here in kansas. the only difference is in the summer the east is humid and in ks it’s dead heat. also the east gets more snow and kansas gets more ice. that probably didn’t help though lol</p>
<p>Why go freeze to death when Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, Duke, William & Mary, Davidson, and Wake Forest all have such mild winters. Nothing better than shorts in January.</p>
<p>Is it colder in New England than in, say, the Midwest?</p>
<p>A great tool for researching weather in a specific place is to look at the averages (both temp and rainfall) chart on the Weather Channel website.</p>
<p>or the averages in city-data.com</p>
<p>I’m asking about perceived coldness though…and harshness of winter</p>
<p>Here are some examples, according to the Weather Channel:
Amherst: average high in January 33, average high in February 36
Stanford: average high in Jan 58, average high in Feb 62
UC San Diego: average high in Jan 66, average high in Feb 66.</p>
<p>Bonanza (and Mark Twain) is right on. The weather is constantly in flux. Every few years we get an “Indian summer,” or a stretch of warm weather late in the season–sometimes a week of 70s as late as November. The winters are survivable. They could be a cool change of pace if you’re from a place that doesn’t get snow. Having lived here all my life, I can’t wait to go somewhere warmer and not have to wear gloves to prevent my hands from getting mauled by the cold.</p>
<p>PS The summers are very, very pleasant, especially on Cape Cod beaches, but that would probably be a non-factor unless you took summer sessions.</p>
<p>Will I survive if I don’t like wearing things like gloves and large coats because I think they restrict movement and are generally annoying?</p>
<p>I usually make the 30 foot dash from my house to my car in a hoodie. Gloves and a peacoat if it’s below 20 degrees. You may be able to get away with a sweater and no gloves if you don’t mind chapped, dry hands and being pretty cold. Sometimes I don’t mind. Most of the times I do.</p>
<p>I’ve lived for extended periods in the Chicago, Detroit, and Boston areas. Winters in the Great Lakes part of the Midwest tend to be very overcast. Boston winters seemed to have much more sunlight. But overall the temp and snowfall in Detroit seems to be roughly the same as Boston. Chicago seemed to be a bit hasher in the winter (and summer) than Boston. And I’m pretty sure the Wisconsin/Minnesota/Dakotas area of the Midwest is significantly harsher in the winter than most of southern New England.</p>
<p>Wearing gloves is a lot less annoying than having numb fingers. There seems to be a much better array of lightweight, non-bulky coats and footwear than there was a few decades ago. Get a coat lined with Thinsulate (an amazingly non-bulky insulation), and some Gore-Tex-lined shoes/boots, and you should be ok. Keeping your feet dry (and therefore warm) is about half the battle.</p>
<p>Coming from a Canadian-extracted Chicago-lander, how would the winters and summers on the east coast compare?</p>
<p>I love the Chicago winters, but the summers (other than this current freakish one) have been sweltering.</p>