Canton Climate Patterns

Canton has a humid continental climate, sitting high enough and far enough north-east to feel some of Lake Erie’s influence.

Summer

June to August is warm and humid, with highs of 27 to 29°C and nights around 16°C. Thunderstorms are frequent, often in the late afternoon, and humidity makes the heat feel worse than the readings. Enshrinement week falls in the hottest and stickiest part of the year, which matters for anyone standing in a parade crowd.

Winter

December to March is cold: highs of 2 to 4°C and lows around minus 6°C, with roughly 100 centimetres of snow in an average year. Canton lies near the southern fringe of the lake-effect snowbelt, so it gets appreciably more than central or southern Ohio without the extremes of the Chardon ridge north-east of here.

Cloud

North-east Ohio is among the cloudiest parts of the United States in winter; December and January average very few clear days.

Spring and autumn

Autumn is the better of the two and is reliably good into late October, with strong colour on the hills to the south. Spring is late, wet and volatile, with severe weather possible from April.

Fog and the basin

The city sits low relative to the ground around it, and cold air draining off the surrounding rises pools in the basin on clear autumn and spring nights, producing frequent morning fog along the creek and a few degrees more frost than the suburbs on the hills.

Rainfall

Around 970 millimetres a year, spread fairly evenly.