Here's how often Calgary has seen a white Christmas since 2000
A white Christmas in Calgary is magical, and with the holidays just around the corner, we got curious as to how often we do (or don’t) have plenty of snow on the ground.
Sometimes our memory likes to recall many Christmas Days as perfectly snow-covered and picturesque here in Calgary, and we got curious about just how many times YYC has seen a white Christmas so far this century.
Daily Hive chatted with Alysa Pederson, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), on how each Christmas Day in Calgary has shaken out since 2000.
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The snowiest Christmas Day in Calgary was in 2016, when a snow depth of 16 centimetres was recorded at the Calgary International Airport station. It was a different situation just last year, however, with 2024 being one of the nine brown Christmases recorded so far this century.
The other eight brown Christmas years in Calgary were 2014, 2011, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002.
How does ECCC define a brown Christmas?
A brown Christmas in the eyes of ECCC means a small amount of snow may be on the ground, but anything less than two centimetres takes it into the brown Christmas category.
Pederson added that the snow depth is recorded at 7 a.m. local time on Christmas, and with the recording only taking place at an ECCC weather station, sometimes the statistics tell a different story than what the public can see.
“If the airport finds a skiff of snow, they could measure that as two centimetres. When you’re talking numbers that low to most of the city, like Nose Hill, I expect, if the airport had two centimetres, they were reporting, I expect Nose Hill had none. So it just depends kind of where you’re at in the city, it could feel like a brown Christmas.”
When it comes to Calgary, Pederson added that we’re way more likely to see snow disappear by the time Christmas Day rolls around compared to somewhere like Edmonton, thanks to experiencing warm spells due to chinooks.
“That’s the caveat, I guess, talking about brown Christmases, that doesn’t mean like we didn’t have any snow up to that point. It just means that it was balanced with a lot of warm days to melt it down.”
Calgary has endured a bit of a dry spell for snowfall amounts so far this season, accumulating approximately three centimetres of snow, with one centimetre falling on Oct. 12 and 1.8 centimetres falling on Nov. 7.
Looking ahead to December, the forecast is hinting that it will be relatively normal, just maybe a little bit cooler than normal for parts of the province, while precipitation seems to be a bit lower as well.
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“December is not typically our wet time of year. That’s obviously June; October can have some precipitation because that’s when we’re in our seasonal transition. But once we get into December, you might have a storm or two, but you’re not really getting a significant number of storms coming through,” Pederson said.
“December is not really when we get a snow event; it’s not a common thing. Typically, our biggest snowfall events happen in the spring, in March and April.”
There is also such a thing as a “perfect” Christmas in addition to a white Christmas, with ECCC stating that to meet that threshold, two centimetres of snow or more must be on the ground on Christmas morning, and snow must be present in the air sometime Christmas Day. Between 1955 and 2007, just four per cent of Christmas Days in Calgary experienced such an event.
If you were curious about more data, check out ECCC’s historical Christmas snowfall data online.