Thirty-five years ago on Christmas Day, much of the Southeast found itself blanketed in snow—and a lot of it, at least by local standards. Charleston and Savannah broke records at 8 inches and 3.6 inches, respectively. In North Carolina, Wilmington got buried in a whopping 15.3 inches, and Cape Hatteras wasn’t far behind with 13.3. There were flurries in Tampa and Sarasota; it even got pretty cold down in Key West. That 1989 snowstorm went down in history as the Southeast coast’s most dramatic ever.
Will it ever happen again? Never say never—but let’s just say we’re far more likely to have T-shirt weather on Christmas. “If warmer climate trends continue as they have for the long term, it’s likely our chances to see snow will drop even lower than what they are now,” says Shea Gibson, a Charleston meteorologist and wind forecaster with the private weather technology company WeatherFlow-Tempest. Right now, the Southeastern Lowcountry only sees one such event once every three years, per historical average for measurable snowfall.
“Here in the Southeast, we have to have the perfect combination of ingredients for snow to happen,” Gibson explains. First, cold Arctic air has to settle into the area. Second, there has to be moisture. Third, an easterly element of wind cannot be blowing in off the ocean, which is generally much warmer than the air temperature and adds a melting layer into the equation. And an extended cold snap that allows the ground to get cold doesn’t hurt, either. “It’s very uncommon for these things to all happen at the same time,” Gibson says, “but that’s not to say it doesn’t ever happen.”
He remembers the 1989 snowstorm—and a record-breaking storm in January 2018 too. “For [the 2018] event, even a week before Christmas and into the New Year, we had a fairly cold pattern set up for days at a time,” Gibson says. The ground temperature came down, and the snow started to stick. “That snow was the most powdery snow I’ve seen in the Southeast, ever,” he says.
Usually, cold conditions and moisture just bring ice and sleet to the East Coast. In more interior Southern states, including Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee, snowstorms aren’t entirely uncommon as Gulf moisture combines with cold Arctic air diving down from the North. “That’s more likely to happen in the interior states than the coastal states because you don’t have that sea air,” Gibson explains. “It’s why the Deep South gets more of these snow events than even we do on the coast, even if they’re at a lower latitude than us.”
Unfortunately, for both the interior and the coastal South, snow isn’t looking likely on this Christmas Day, despite a cold snap projected to arrive shortly before. But there might be a glimmer of hope for 2025. “We’ll see how the pattern goes in January—we are heading into a La Niña phase for the winter, and if snow is going to happen, that’s when we see the best chances.”
