What's the Chance of White Christmas in Clinton Township?

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DETROIT, MI - It may take a weather miracle for Metro Detroit — or almost anywhere in the country, for that matter — to have a White Christmas this year.

Statistically, metro Detroit has a 47 percent probability of having an inch or more of snow on the ground at Christmastime. It’s usually cold enough in December for precipitation to fall in the form of snow, AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Jim Andrews.

But historic records — for cold temperatures, that is — don’t mean much this year.

Saturday’s high temperature of 63 degrees at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus broke a 1949 record for Dec. 12, the Detroit Free Press reports. And Sunday temperatures were shaping up to shatter a more than century-long record of 60 degrees for Dec.13 set in 1881.

There’s plenty of precipitation in the forecast, but warm December temperatures are expected to continue through December, according to The Weather Channel.

Any icy Christmas, which holds none of the charm of a White Christmas, doesn’t appear to be on the horizon, either. With Christmas less than two weeks away, the long-term outlook calls for overnight temperatures remaining above freezing for the most part.

The National Weather Service’s December temperature predictions also call for warmer-than-normal temperatures for the majority of the United States/

Several different factors are in play causing this winter weather (or lack thereof), but the biggest is an historic El Niño.

Put simply: El Niño is a climate pattern that starts with unusually warm waters in the pacific ocean, causing storms and mudslides to some places and droughts to others.

But El Niño also typically causes warm weather in California, the northern plains and the east coast, with colder temperatures in the Rockies and parts of Texas — consistent with the predictions from the National Weather Service.

And 2015’s El Niño is approaching the strongest ever recorded, as measured by sea surface temperatures.

“Longer term we may tend towards a warmer regime, but we can certainly still have serious bouts of cold during the winter,” the Weather Channel’s Carl Parker told Patch. “This pattern has occasionally looked like the historical analogs of the strongest El Niño events, at least in terms of temperatures.”

In addition to El Niño, Wilson said the jet stream is causing the extremely cold arctic air to get “stuck” up in Canada.

“We’re getting warmer winter weather because the very cold arctic air is stuck well up to the north — over the Canadian border,” she said.

“The jet stream position will not change much for the central and eastern part of the U.S. While the jet stream will dig south out west, allowing for some colder air to sink into that region, the central and eastern U.S. will remain under a ridge as the jet stream stays north — and highs will be 10 to 20, even 30 degrees above average.”

This year is also on pace to be, yet again, the warmest on record globally, Parker said.

So is there any relief (at least for winter weather lovers) in sight? Yes and no, experts say.

“In the short term, there are signs of a cool down to more normal conditions for this time of the year across the Northeast beginning next Thursday and running through the weekend,” the Weather Channel’s Winter Weather Expert Tom Niziol said. “In fact, I would not be surprised to see some snow in the Northeast Friday into Saturday of next week.

“However, that cold air does not stick around for long as temperatures are expected to rebound again as we head toward Christmas Day.”

(Marc Torrence of the Patch national staff contributed to this report.)

» Photo via Flickr / Creative Commons