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| Snow cascades down from pine trees in West Rutland, Vermont on Christmas Day, 2017 after a pre-dawn snowfall ensured a white Christmas. No such luck this year, as almost all of Vermont will have bare ground for this year's holiday. |
The snow mostly melted out of Vermont during our latest flood disaster. The prospects of any replacement snow seem dim.
Those of us who got a dusting of snow Tuesday will probably see that disappear by the big day. As will likely the lucky few who got a bit of lake effect snow off of Lake Champlain on Thursday.
In other words, if you're dreaming of a white Christmas in Vermont, keep dreaming unless you live way up in the mountains.
OK, a few spots might see a flurry or a very brief period of freezing drizzle Saturday night. but that for sure won't provide a white Christmas.
It's not just us here in Vermont. Pretty much the entire nation is expected to be warmer than average on Christmas, and precious few places - even those areas that are routinely frigid this time of year - will be balmy and snow-free.
This might be the first Christmas on record that northern Minnesota has bare ground. Many places in the northern Plains, Great Lakes and parts of southern Canada expect temperatures to be as much as 35 degree above normal. Forecasters expect many record highs, especially in the middle of North America.
Here in Vermont, we won't have record warmth on Christmas. But expected daytime highs in the low 40s will be at least 10 degrees balmier than normal. In the warmer valleys, overnight lows might not get below freezing.
VERMONT DATA
A rough definition of a white Christmas is having at least an inch of snow on the ground.
Climate change has been really mucking up Vermont's weather, as it has around the globe. But perhaps climate change has yet to be too grinchy when it comes to snow on Christmas.
Most decades feature seven or eight out of ten years with a white Christmas in Burlington, according to National Weather Service data. In the 1990s, it looked like those days were over. That decade, Burlington had only four white Christmases out 10.
But 2000-2009 had eight white Christmases, and 2010-2019 had seven such holidays. This decade, there was no snow on the ground during record heat (it was 65 degrees) on Christmas Day in 2020. But 2021 and 2022 each had four inches of flakes on the ground.
For those who like extremes, the biggest Christmas Day snowstorm in Burlington amounted to 16.9 inches in 1978.
The deepest snow on the ground Christmas morning was in 1970, when 32 inches on the ground surely almost got Santa's sleigh stuck. Montpelier's snow depth that morning was a whopping 43 inches.
Honorable mention for Christmas snow goes to 1969. There was only nine inches of snow on the ground in Burlington that morning. But on Christmas night, one of Vermont's worst and most extreme winter storms on record began and lasted three days.
Burlington got 29.7 inches of snow in that storm, which at the time was the biggest snowstorm on record there. (The record since has been beaten). Waitsfield in the 1969 post-Christmas storm received 45 inches. A severe ice storm struck the Connecticut River Valley in that storm.
Other Christmas records in Burlington, with a hat tip to the National Weather Service office in South Burlington for all this info:
Hottest: 65 degrees in 2020. But Rutland takes the cake for Christmas warmth: It was 69 degrees there at Christmas, 2015.
Coldest: 25 below in 1980. Though, according to David Ludlum's Vermont Weather Book, it was even colder on Christmas, 1872 It got down to 45 below in Lunenburg, Vermont, 41 below in Woodstock and 40 below in Randolph
Warmest Low Temperatures: 45 degrees in 1964
Coldest high temperature: 5 below in 1980.
Wettest: 0.76 inches, in 1978 (if you melted down all the snow that fell that day).
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