Data story · Weather
The coldest cities in the world, year by year.
One city in Huezle drops below −50 °C every winter without fail. No other city does it even one year in three, and a prairie city in Canada has colder nights than Moscow.
Every strip on this page is a real Weather strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Weather.
How to read the strips
Each strip is one city, with one band per year from 2001 on the left to 2025 on the right. Most strips here are coloured by that year’s coldest night, the single lowest daily minimum, from Mild through Freezing to Deep freeze. The colder the night, the deeper the colour, on one scale for every city.
The data is NASA POWER, a gridded dataset built from satellites and a weather model, so a city’s value is its grid cell’s rather than one station’s reading.
Yakutsk: below −50 °C every year
- Mild
- Freezing
- Deep freeze
Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, is often called the coldest big city on Earth, and the data agrees. Its coldest night averages −53.2 °C, and the deepest in this data is −57.2 °C in 2008. What sets it apart is consistency: all 25 winters fell below −50 °C. Yellowknife managed that in 8 years and Norilsk in 6, and they are second and third on the list.
Yakutsk is extreme in both directions. Its hottest day of the year averages 33.5 °C, which puts 86.7 degrees between a typical summer peak and a typical winter low, the widest gap of any city in the data.
Canada, and colder than Moscow
- Yellowknife · −48.4 °C
- Winnipeg · −38.6 °C
- Moscow · −29.2 °C
- Mild
- Freezing
- Deep freeze
Canada takes four of the seven coldest-night spots. Winnipeg is the surprise among them: a prairie city rather than an Arctic one, with an average year of 3.5 °C, yet its coldest night is colder than anywhere in Europe in this data. Thirteen of the 193 cities have dropped to −40 °C or below at least once since 2001.
Moscow has the reputation, but Montreal (−32.4 °C) and Minneapolis (−31.1 °C) both have colder winter nights. All three are inland, where winter air arrives off frozen land rather than off an ocean. At the other end, 85 of the 193 cities never dropped below freezing in any of the 25 years.
The coldest year-round: a different list
Rank by average temperature across the whole year and Iqaluit comes first at −10.0 °C, then Norilsk and Yakutsk. This strip uses the temperature measure, from Cold through Mild to Hot.
- Cold
- Mild
- Hot
Longyearbyen, the northernmost city in the data, averages −5.9 °C. It is cold all year rather than brutal in winter: its coldest night averages −27.6 °C, only 17th, while its hottest day averages just 10.0 °C. The sea around Svalbard holds its temperature through the seasons, so the island never swings the way inland Siberia and Canada do.
What about Oymyakon and Antarctica? The coldest air temperatures ever measured were in Antarctica and, in the north, in Siberian villages such as Oymyakon. None is a city, and none is in the data. This page shows a typical year’s coldest night for a grid cell around each city, which is milder than any one record-setting thermometer.
For the other end of the scale, see the hottest cities. The far north also shows up on the cities warming fastest, and all five measures are in the Weather category.
Huezle shows one of these strips with four cities to pick from. Could you tell Siberia from the Canadian prairie?
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What is the coldest city in the world?
Of the 193 cities in Huezle, Yakutsk in Siberia has the coldest winters: its coldest night of the year averaged −53.2 °C from 2001 to 2025, and fell below −50 °C every year. By average temperature across the whole year, Iqaluit in Canada is coldest, at −10.0 °C.
Is Moscow colder than Montreal?
Not at night in winter, in this data. Montreal’s coldest night of the year averaged −32.4 °C and Moscow’s −29.2 °C over 2001 to 2025. Minneapolis, at −31.1 °C, was colder than Moscow too.
Which is the coldest city in the United States?
Of the US cities in Huezle, Fairbanks, Alaska has the coldest nights, averaging −38.9 °C for the coldest night of each year. Minneapolis is the coldest in the lower 48 states included in the data.
More guides
- The hottest cities in the world, year by year.Which cities have the hottest days, and which are hottest all year round? 193 cities, 25 years of NASA data, drawn as strips of colour.
- Which cities are warming fastest?The 25-year temperature trend for 193 cities, from NASA data. Central Europe warmed fastest, the tropics slowest, and a few cities went the other way.
- The windiest cities in the world.The windiest of 193 cities are all in the Southern Hemisphere, the calmest all in the rainforest. Everyday wind, 2001 to 2025, as strips of colour.
- The cities most often hit by earthquakes and tropical cyclones.Davao and Tokyo lead 58 cities for strong earthquakes and tropical storms nearby, 2001 to 2025, counted year by year from USGS and NOAA.
Now try naming one yourself.
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