Do you need a snowblower in Baltimore, MD?
Your answer for Baltimore
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 2.5 tons of snow on this driveway in Baltimore, spread over a few light falls. That is shovel work.
Get a wide plastic shovel with a bent handle before the first fall, and if you have a bad back, consider a cordless single-stage instead: the snow in Baltimore is light enough for one.
A normal Baltimore winter
- Snow a year
- 19 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.9 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- about once every 5 winters
- Days with snow on the ground
- 13
Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 2.0 times as much. It tends to stay, so each storm lands on the last one.
On a two car driveway that is about 2.5 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in Baltimore
- Nov0.1
- Dec2.5
- Jan6.4
- Feb7.5
- Mar2.8
Snow worth clearing runs from December to March, heaviest in February. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
Baltimore and its neighbours
Baltimore is number 8 of 23 Maryland towns here for snowfall; Hagerstown gets the most at 33 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laurel, MD | 20 | 16 in | A shovel is enough |
| Bel Air, MD | 22 | 29 in | Two-stage snowblower |
| Annapolis, MD | 23 | 16 in | A shovel is enough |
| Bowie, MD | 25 | 16 in | A shovel is enough |
| Greenbelt, MD | 26 | 16 in | A shovel is enough |
| New Carrollton, MD | 27 | 16 in | A shovel is enough |
Where these numbers come from
Read next: What a winter of snow weighs and Why storm depth matters more than snowfall.
NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals from Baltimore Wash International Airport, 10.0 miles from Baltimore. A normal winter, not this winter's forecast. Snow is weighed at 6.24 pounds a cubic foot, fresh and fairly dry; wet spring snow can weigh three times that.