Anyway, the article is here, anyway, and he cites a lot of statistics to make his points. And you know what that means!
First of all, population. See, you can take population one of two ways: only the city proper, or the entire metropolitan area. The Twin Cities are unique in the fact that they're made up of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and although Minneapolis is larger, they tend to go in a pair when it comes to population. The populations of the cities themselves is:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 1,547,901 (11,457 per square mile)
Minneapolis, Minnesota - 385,378 (7,020 per square mile)
Saint Paul, Minnesota - 287,151 (5,438 per square mile)
Thus, the combined population of the Twin Cities is about 43% of the population of Philadelphia proper. Now, the metropolitan areas, just to show that the MSP metro is proportionally less urban than the Delaware Valley:
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington - 5,968,252
Minneapolis-Saint Paul-Bloomington - 3,269,814
Now, snowfall totals. The Twin Cities gets an average of 54.4 inches of snow per year, according to NOAA. The peak months are:
January - 12.8 inches
March - 10.4 inches
November - 9.9 inches
December - 9.5 inches
February - 7.9 inches
April - 3. inches
October - 0.6 inches
May - 0.1 inches
The same information from Philadelphia:
Average yearly snowfall: 20.5 inches
January - 7.4 inches
February - 6.9 inches
March - 3.2 inches
December - 2.1 inches
April - 0.5 inches
November - 0.4 inches
October - 0.1 inches
In the article, one of the points is that "Philadelphia gets more snow now than Minnesota". This was certainly true last year - in the 2009-2010 season, Philadelphia received 78.7" of snow, where Minneapolis got just above 40.7". In the 2008-2009 season, however, Minneapolis received about 45.0", where Philadelphia had 22.8". Here's a comparison of the last thirty years in both:
On average over the past thirty years, Minneapolis gets 31.6" more inches of snow than Philadelphia.
