Do you need a snowblower in Emporia, KS?
Your answer for Emporia
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 2.1 tons of snow on this driveway in Emporia, 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 Emporia is light enough for one.
What a Emporia winter brings
- Snow a year
- 16 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.9 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- about once every 10 winters
- Days with snow on the ground
- 12
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 2.1 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in Emporia
- Oct0.1
- Nov1.4
- Dec3.9
- Jan5.5
- Feb4.1
- Mar1.0
- Apr0.3
Snow worth clearing runs from November to March, heaviest in January. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
Emporia and its neighbours
Emporia is number 8 of 38 Kansas towns here for snowfall; Dodge City gets the most at 19 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topeka, KS | 51 | 17 in | A shovel is enough |
| Ottawa, KS | 52 | 9 in | A shovel is enough |
| El Dorado, KS | 54 | 5 in | A shovel is enough |
| Junction City, KS | 56 | 7 in | A shovel is enough |
| Manhattan, KS | 59 | 18 in | A shovel is enough |
| Lawrence, KS | 63 | 10 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 Miller 4 SSW, 15.5 miles from Emporia. 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.
- Days with snow on the ground come from a second nearby station, because the closest one does not record snow depth.