Will We Have a White Christmas?

To be perfectly candid, I have no idea. It's still more than ten days away.

And any forecaster who tells you that he does know this far out, is feeding you a line of complete BS. The atmospheric systems that will create our weather Christmas weekend don't exist yet and can't reliably be forecast yet. Personally, I don't trust any forecast more than five days ahead (never mind that we do a seven-day forecast on TV, it's sketchy at best).

That said... if the jet stream stays as far south as it is now and allows the arctic air to continue flowing into the region, thus keeping our temperatures sufficiently below average... we just might have a White Christmas.

Something to remember: the average daytime high in Columbus, Ohio, on December 25 is 38 degrees. With some sunshine, that's enough to melt snow fairly quickly. It's also warm enough to let any precip fall as rain instead of snow.

A survey from the Climate Prediction Center looked at data from 1961 through 1990 and found that the Columbus area has about a 23% chance of having an inch or more of snow on the ground on Christmas Day.

Here's what Christmas Day has looked like for the past 12 years here in Columbus:

2009: 0.79" of rain, no snow on the ground
2008: no snow on the ground
2007: no snow on the ground
2006: 0.57" of rain,
      no snow on the ground (snow on the 26th)
2005: 0.51" or rain, trace of snow,
      no snow on the ground
2004: 3" of snow on the ground, trace of new snow
2003: trace of new snow, but not sticking to the ground
2002: 0.6" of new snow
2001: 0.1" of new snow, but not sticking to the ground
2000: 2" on the ground
1999: Trace of snow on the ground, not enough to
      measure, grass clearly showing through
1998: nada

In other words, in the past dozen years, we've had only three White Christmases in Columbus.

Let's keep an eye on it in the next few days and see how things begin to shape up in the extended part of the forecast.