The shaded band on the map is the hemisphere currently living the warm half of its year. We look only there — snow in the middle of winter is no surprise.
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Hemisphere in its warm season Snow
The usual reason is altitude. Temperature falls by about 6.5 °C for every 1,000 metres of elevation. On a day that is 30 °C at sea level, it is below freezing at 4,000 metres. Mont Blanc, Denali, Mount Logan and Everest are all far too cold for rain in July.
The second reason is extreme latitude. In the interior of the Greenland ice sheet at 3,200 metres, or at the Arctic research stations, summer barely rises above freezing; snow in July is an ordinary event there.
And then there are the places with no seasons at all. Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya sit within a few hundred kilometres of the equator, where altitude does all the work.
Because snow there is not surprising. While Türkiye sweats through August, Antarctica is in the middle of its winter; snow at Vostok Station tells you nothing except that it snows in winter. What this page is after is the paradox — places living their warm season and taking snow anyway.
The filter works like this: first we work out which hemisphere is in the warm half of its year — March to August in the north, September to February in the south. Then only the locations in that hemisphere are scanned. We do not invent the season name either: meteorological seasons run in three-month blocks, so October in the southern hemisphere is spring, not summer, and the page says so.
These are not random cities. 114 locations were chosen where snow is genuinely plausible: the Himalaya and Karakoram, the Alps, the Andes, the Caucasus, Greenland and Arctic stations, Siberia, the North American ranges, New Zealand, Antarctic bases and seven high points in Türkiye. Each scan is a single request, cached for half an hour. Source: Open-Meteo.
A location enters the snow list if measured snowfall is above zero or the weather code is in the snow class. Places below freezing without snowfall are listed separately — merging the two would read as “there is snow” and mislead.
The Turkish name of this site comes from a 1996 Serdar Ortaç song that uses summer snowfall as an image of the impossible. English has its own version of the idea — Prince called a song “Sometimes It Snows in April”. Going by the list above, the impossible thing happens somewhere on Earth most of the year.