White Christmas in Kansas City? Here’s why it’ll stay in your dreams
If you’re hoping for a white Christmas in Kansas City, you’ll have to keep dreaming — this year’s forecast is looking green, or maybe brown.
But if warm weather is on your holiday wish list, this Christmas will likely make you jolly.
“Unfortunately for white Christmas lovers across most of the country, we are dominated right now by mild air off the Pacific Ocean,” said Kevin Roth, lead meteorologist at The Weather Company for The Weather Channel app and weather.com.
“All the chilly stuff is blocked up in Canada. So warm-weather fans are happy. Snow lovers, not so happy.”
Kansas City could actually break a record this year for its warmest Christmas Day. Temperatures are expected to reach a high near 70 degrees; the record is 67 degrees, set in 1922.
Christmas in Kansas City has also been gradually warming since 1900. The average high temperature in the metro on Christmas Day is 40 degrees, based on data from 1991 to 2020. But over the past decade, the average high has risen to 45 degrees.
For those who must see snow, the closest place Roth expects to still have snow on the ground Christmas morning might be northeast Iowa.
“If anybody can afford to go for a ski vacation in the Rockies, they have snow,” Roth said. “But even there, there’s not as much snow as usual.”
It’s not that it’s been warm there. The weather pattern has been very dry for them, Roth said, so they haven’t had the precipitation yet.
What is influencing Kansas City’s weather
Currently, the jet stream is blowing very fast across the northern part of the country from west to east. While this is great for eastbound airlines because it gives them a tailwind, it keeps milder air across most of the U.S. and cold Arctic air locked up north, Roth said.
“And for the next two weeks, that looks like it’ll stay up in Canada, maybe the very northern tier of the U.S.,” Roth said. There may be brief shots of cold air, but the mild weather will quickly return.
Add to that a La Niña weather pattern, when Pacific Ocean waters are cooler than usual, is also affecting Kansas City’s weather.
“This pattern that we are in now is very typical of La Niña, where most of the country has a mild winter, less snow than usual,” Roth said. “The exceptions are up along the Canadian border and over into the northern parts of the Northeast.”
But even then, it’s rare for Kansas City to have snow on the ground on Christmas Day, about a 20% to 25%, or one in every five years.
According to data dating back to 1893, Kansas City has had only 27 white Christmases.
Meteorologists define a white Christmas as having at least 1 inch of snow on the ground Christmas morning. If it doesn’t snow until after the measurement is taken, that doesn’t qualify as a white Christmas, even if an inch or more falls.
The last time the metro had an inch of snow on the ground on Christmas morning was in 2022, according to weather data. The snowiest year was 1918, when 10 inches of snow were on the ground on Christmas morning. More recently, 6 inches of snow were on the ground in 2009, making it the fifth-snowiest white Christmas in Kansas City.
The mild weather is likely to continue through the end of the year, but a pattern change may occur in January, Roth said. Forecasts indicate the jet stream will have a bit of a dip in the northwest around New Year’s Eve.
If that continues eastward, it would reach the Plains and then the Kansas City area by around the first of the New Year, Jan. 2nd or 3rd at the latest, Roth said.
“I think we will probably have to hope for next Christmas,” Roth said about Kansas City’s chances for snow on the ground Christmas Day.
