Brown Christmas likely in store for Edmonton
Edmontonians dreaming of a white Christmas will have to keep dreaming.
The holiday weather in the capital city this year will be decidedly brown and balmy.
Environment Canada meteorologist Alysa Pederson said people expecting a fresh dusting of the white stuff in time for Christmas morning will be disappointed.
No precipitation is expected to fall in the Edmonton region in the coming days and with unseasonably mild temperatures expected to stick around, any skiff of snow still lingering in the city is expected to melt.
According to Pederson, it's not going to get any more snowy and what you see is what you are going to get.
Not so frightful
The current forecast calls for a sunny Christmas day with an afternoon just above zero. Temperatures on Boxing Day could reach 6 C.
If the forecast holds, it will be the first snowless Christmas Edmonton has seen since 2005.
Alberta's capital city is not alone. Environment Canada's snow map uses brown dots to show snowless stations and it's brown in communities from coast to coast.
However, for a white Christmas to qualify as such in Environment Canada's history books, there must be at least two centimetres of snow on the ground. It's considered the Canadian standard among meteorologists.
As of early Friday morning, two centimetres was left standing at the Edmonton International Airport weather station so technically, if that smidgen of snow hangs on, this Christmas could go down in the history books as a white one.
"So if that doesn't drop, then that would be the minimum to call it a white Christmas, despite the fact that it is very brown outside," Pederson said. "It will be down to the wire."
Although rare, a brown or green Christmas is not unheard of in Edmonton. According to the historical data, the likelihood that Edmonton be snowy on December 25 is around 85 per cent, Pederson said.
Edmonton's snowiest Christmas day was in 1996, when 36 centimentres of snow covered the ground.
The coldest overnight low was in 1880 when the temperature after dark, plunged to –39.4 C.
The coldest day was in 1917 when afternoon temperatures only climbed to a bitterly cold –28.9. The warmest Christmas on record was in 1987, when temperatures hit 8.9 C.
Pederson said the forecast for the coming week will remain unseasonably warm.
The current forecast sets the stage for what is expected to be a warm and dry winter season said Pederson, driven by the prevailing El Niño weather patterns.
The periodic weather system that brings warm weather to much of North America is expected to shape the forecast for the rest of the season. Instead of snow, many regions across the west are contending with drought conditions.
But have no doubt, Alberta will still get walloped at some point with the wintry weather it's accustomed to.
"It doesn't mean that we're not going to have any arctic outbreaks where we hit - 20 C but, in the next couple of weeks, it's not looking like that is going to come down this way."
