Could Charlotte get snow before the year ends? What climate experts say
Now that fall has arrived, the weather in Charlotte is finally cooling off. This week, there’s been a break in the warm weather with highs in the mid-70s, and dropping down to the 40s and 50s overnight into the mornings.
As the year wraps up, it’ll only get colder. But is there a chance of snow in the forecast as the year wraps up?
Chance of snow in Charlotte
Historically, climate experts say the chances of any snow before the end of the year tend to be lower than the chance of snow that might come later in the heart of winter.
According to Corey Davis, an assistant state climatologist from the North Carolina State Climate Office, only about 14 percent of previous snow days in Charlotte happened in November or December. Most have been in January, February, March or April.
“Looking at data from recent years, we have recent history on our side for getting snow but we also have our longer term climatology that kind of works against the odds of snow before the end of the year,” Davis told The Charlotte Observer.
“We are going into an El Niño pattern for this coming winter. Those tend to be a little bit wetter for us in North Carolina in really getting more of those storm systems kind of up across our state or along the coast. They can bring wintry effects sometimes.”
El Niño impacts on NC’s winter weather
In June, NOAA declared that El Niño conditions had officially developed, The Charlotte Observer previously reported. According to the NC State Climate Office, it typically has the strongest impacts on the weather in the Southeast in December, January and February.
The last time we went into an El Niño winter back in 2018, Davis said the Charlotte area got 2.9 inches of snow during the first week of December. But it’s still too early to say for certain whether or not there will be snow before it’s time to ring in the new year.
“El Niño has historically been, at least, wetter for us. In some cases, they’ve been a little bit snowier. But also, the last few have been pretty warm as well so that certainly doesn’t guarantee snow this year,” Davis explained. “I remember back then [in December 2018] thinking ‘this could be a good winter for snow’ and that was really the only snow event that we saw the entire season.”
History of Charlotte snowfalls
The Charlotte area didn’t get any snow last winter when the Carolinas were “locked into a warmer weather pattern for a lot of this year” like La Niña, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
“There are similar cycles that we can get locked into for weeks or months at a time,” Mike Rehnberg, a meteorologist at the NWS in Charlotte previously said. “It just so happened that we were locked into these cycles for a huge portion of the 2022-23 winter season that lowered the opportunities for winter weather in the Carolinas.”
The last time it snowed in Charlotte was January 2022, when 4.3 inches fell. Since 1878, there have been 12 winters where Charlotte has recorded no snow.
While it’s still unclear what’s in the forecast for this winter, there are parts of North Carolina that typically do get snow every year, and some aren’t too far from Charlotte, like Boone and Banner Elk.
“Our higher elevation areas, especially the top of Grandfather Mountain, the top of Mt. Mitchell, these places that are more than a mile up in elevation, they’re pretty regular in getting snowfall every year,” Davis said. “Last year was a snowless winter across most of the Piedmont. It was really only those mountain areas that picked up any snow.”
But if Charlotte does get snow, it likely won’t be much in comparison to the mountain areas.
“The annual snowfall in Charlotte is 3.5 inches,” Davis said. “We could easily see that much in a single storm. There have also been years where we’ve had only two or three more minor storms that haven’t added up to 3.5 inches. So in terms of telling whether we’d be above or below that average, it’s really hard to do going into a winter because it’s so dependent on the types of events we get.”
Charlotte Observer reporter Evan Moore contributed to this report.
