With the Thanksgiving leftovers dwindling and Black Friday behind us, Christmas takes center stage for many people. WLRN-Miami Herald Reporter Kenny Malone – a Pennsylvania native – tried to figure out likelihood of a Christmas “just like the ones he used to know.”
For the last month, at least once a week, I’ve caught myself humming a very specific Christmas carol: White Christmas. But seriously, what are the odds of having snow, in South Florida on Christmas?
Jeff Masters is the head meteorologist for the weather website wunderground.com. He said, “I think maybe you’ve got a better chance of having a white Christmas in Miami if you get a cocaine smuggling airplane to explode and shower white dust down on you below.”
Jokes aside, he was willing to crunch some numbers on the probability of a white Christmas in South Florida.
Start with January 19th, 1977, “The Day It Snowed in Miami.” The next day, it was front page news in the Miami Herald.
In more than a century of weather record keeping, that is the only day snow fell on Miami. Remember we’re trying to figure out the odds of a white “Christmas” not just any old snowy day in Miami. Masters says that puts a South Florida White Christmas at about once every 12,000 years.
“We expect our next ice age in about 10,000 years or so", said Masters. "So maybe we should be thinking about the next ice age as far as the next white Christmas.”
Global warming pushes that probability closer to 1 in 20,000, Masters says. Unless there’s a nuclear winter or a massive volcanic eruption. But that’s probably not the kind of White Christmas Bing Crosby sang about.