Dreaming of a white Christmas? Well, 25 years from now, that may have to be the way it stays.
With milder winters making some parts of Canada feel more like fall than Christmas, the white Christmas is getting more and more elusive for some cities – seemingly on a decline from years past.
“It’s things like white Christmases [disappearing] that bothers people more than skinny polar bears,” Environment Canada’s Senior Climatologist David Phillips said in an interview with CTVNews.ca.
“It’s the things that are different in our life that resonate with us more.”
While the image of a Christmas-card perfect, snowy ground may be the ideal in Canada, there’s no hard and fast standard for what constitutes a white Christmas around the world, Phillips says.
In Britain, where bookmakers will take bets on whether a white Christmas will occur, the Met Office’s official definition is that a single snowflake is observed falling during the 24 hours of Dec. 25, regardless of whether it stays on the ground or not.
But in Canada, Phillips says that Environment Canada’s standards are a little more rigorous, requiring at least two centimetres of snow on the ground by 7 a.m. – regardless of whether the snow is fresh or clean – for it to count as a white Christmas.
“As long as you have that white cover of 2 centimetres of more,” Phillips said, “It is in fact a legitimate white Christmas.”
It’s a standard that is becoming more and more commonly used by meteorologists around the world, according to Phillips.
“We’ve led the way on this,” Phillips said. “After all, if there’s anybody that should define what a white Christmas is, it should be Canadians.”
To make for a “perfect” white Christmas according to Environment Canada standards, there must be at least 2 centimetres of snow on the ground, with more than one centimetre of falling snow during the day.
While a snowy white winter sets the scene for an idyllic Canadian Christmas with toys, tinsel, and turkey, Phillips says that Dec. 25 is too early into winter to reliably get the cold temperatures and snowfall that a white Christmas requires.
“What prevents [a white Christmas] is either that you’re getting a warm air mass that comes through and melts all the snow that you’ve got or you get rain instead of snow that will melt what you’ve got,” Phillips explains.
“And just a one-degree difference can sometimes make the choice between whether you’re going to get snow or rain.”
That can be especially true in cities, where the presence of such heat-absorbing materials as asphalt and concrete, and the effects of human activity create warmer urban heat islands that are much warmer than surrounding areas.
With growing urban centres being home to almost 82 per cent of the Canadian population, Phillips says that many Canadians may feel like white Christmases are a thing of the past, even though they’re still fairly common.
“So much of the country does have a white Christmas, but that doesn’t mean the majority, or a huge number of us will see it,” Phillips said.
White Christmas historical data
Environment Canada has collected and compiled data on white Christmases for the past 63 years.
The interactive feature at the top of the article allows you to explore the data by city, showing the historical chance of a white Christmas, the average depth of snow on Christmas day, and the chances of a “perfect” Christmas.
The sections also show a comparison of the percentages over the years, comparing the periods of 1965-1984 (then) and 1998-2017 (now), and the differences between them.
Historically, Iqaluit, Kenora, Whitehorse, and Yellowknife are the only cities in Canada that can count on having a white Christmas, with instances recorded by Environment Canada every year between 1955 and 2017.
Other top performers are places such as Winnipeg, Timmins, Quebec City, and Saskatoon, which are likely to see a white Christmas between 94 and 99 per cent of the time, according to Environment Canada’s data.
It’s southern and Atlantic Canada where snow on Christmas starts to get a little less predictable.
Notoriously snowy Ottawa has a 75 per cent chance, while major urban centres such as Calgary have a 60 per cent chance, while Toronto only has a 45 per cent chance.
St. John’s, N.L., is on the high end of the spectrum with a 65 per cent chance of a white Christmas, Saint John, N.B., has a 45 per cent chance, and Halifax sees a 40 per cent chance.
But white Christmases in Canada have been on the decline since the 1980s, with many cities seeing less and less of them.
Since 1985, there have been significant drops across Canada in the chances of having a white Christmas, ranging between 5 per cent in cities like Kamloops and Regina, to 50 per cent in Windsor.
It’s a trend that will not only continue, but Phillips says will likely accelerate over time.
“What we have seen in recent years is an acceleration in a big way, of the kind of warming that we’ve seen,” Phillips said.
Crunching the numbers, Phillips says that the way the declining chances of a white Christmas are going; it’s safe to expect a 20 to 25 per cent drop in the chance of a white Christmas for many Canadian cities.
That would bring cities such as Montreal, which moves more snow each winter than any other city its size in the world, down to approximately a 55 per cent chance, or Calgary down to a 40 per cent chance.
The one exception, surprisingly enough, is Vancouver.
At only a ten per cent chance of a white Christmas, Vancouver is no stranger to green Christmases, with 27 recorded in the last 31 years.
But Phillips says that the odds will never get much slimmer than that.
“It’s like a one in ten now; the chances are it’s probably going to be very similar to that because you’re going to get that freak Christmas Day,” Phillips said.
Phillips is referring to days such as the Christmas of 2008, when Vancouver was hit by a freak weather system that dumped approximately 40 centimetres of snow on Christmas Day – even more than the North Pole.
“I think ten per cent is as low as you’re going to get in the Great White North,” Phillips said. “After all we are the snowiest country in the world – if anybody is going to have a white Christmas it would likely be Canada.”
But it’s not just the frequency of white Christmases that’s changing, Phillips says. Even when cities get to enjoy snow on Christmas, they’re receiving less of it.
“There used to be an average of 16 cm of snow on Christmas day across Canada, a figure that now closer to 11 cm,” Phillips says
While a five centimetre difference may not seem that egregious, keep in mind that number is an average.
While some cities such as London, Ont. or St John’s, N.L., are only seeing one centimetre less of snow on average, even Timmins, Ont., which historically see the second-deepest Christmas snowfalls in Canada, has seen their average Christmas snowfall almost halved, with 22 centimetres less.
So, even if cities do get a white Christmas, the snow likely won’t make them winter wonderlands.
“You might have 2 centimetres of snow, but it may be injurious to your health if you went skiing or tobogganing on some little bit of snow like that,” Phillips said.
What’s the verdict?
So, in 25 years, will Canadians still get to experience a white Christmas?
“People will still be dreaming of a white Christmas, every elf will be praying for a white Christmas, cause it just won’t be in the cards because of climate change,” Phillips says.
While the Great White North will never stop seeing white Christmases completely, if scientific projections on climate change come true, it seems that regularly occurring white Christmases may be a thing of the past.
“Some years you might get two in a row, then you might go five, six years without a white Christmas,” Phillips said.
But if people are looking for a consistent white Christmas, they may have to resort to drastic measures.
“One solution to not having a white Christmas would be to postpone Christmas for a month,” Phillips laughs. “How do you think that would go over?”
