Christmas is just under a week away, and in most years, we have a pretty clear idea if we will have a white Christmas or not.
“The answer is, we don’t know yet, because there’s a few things going on when we determine white Christmases,” said Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Terri Lang. The biggest factor is the amount of snow on the ground. Environment Canada considers it to be a white Christmas if there are two or more centimetres of snow on the ground.
“We have a weak system going through tonight that may give us a dusting of snow, so it may up that total a little bit, but then later on this week, we have some really warm temperatures coming in, so it may melt,” Lang continued.
There is one other factor to be considered.
“One of our weather models wants to bring some snow to the southeast corner of the province but the other weather models don’t," said Lang, "So we can’t make a 100 per cent call yet, even though we’d like to.”
Southeast Saskatchewan doesn’t get a brown Christmas very often, but they have been more frequent in the past ten years, with three (2020, 2019, 2016) in the last 15 years, there have been four brown Christmases overall.
The lack of snow doesn’t help with the mood in the community.
“I think it is bothering a lot of people that there’s not a lot of snow on the ground,” Lang pointed out. “They’re not in that Christmas spirit quite yet, because they look outside and it looks quite brown, and looks like it should be October and not close to Christmas.”
While there is the outside chance of a white Christmas in the southeast, things aren’t as optimistic for that picturesque scene to the west of us, where the chances are pretty low. However, to the north of the southeast corner, in places like Waskesieu, this year will likely be a white Christmas.