Charlotte saw snowflakes for the first time in nearly three years, according to National Weather Service’s Andrew Kimball — but it wasn’t enough to break the city’s three-year spell of no snow.
“Technically, the snow drought continues because it (the amount of snowfall) wasn’t measurable,” Kimball said.
Despite social media images of snow-covered vehicles, the National Weather Service gauge at Charlotte Douglas International Airport didn’t record snowfall over the measurable depth of one-tenth of an inch.
“It did break a streak in a sense that that was the first snowflakes reported in Charlotte since 2022,” Kimball said.
Snow showers formed in the mountains. The edge came close to uptown, but most of the storm stayed farther north toward Lake Norman, where some areas got close to an inch of snow. While last night’s 40 minutes of snow ended Charlotte’s “flake drought,” Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis said folks shouldn’t get their hopes up for a white Christmas.
“Another good example of that was in 2018,” Davis said. “We had a pretty solid snow event in the first week of December that year. Some parts of the Piedmont up in the Triad had almost a foot of snow, and that was really the only snow they saw for the entire winter.”
Still, it is uncommon for Charlotte to receive even flakes this early. And while a single weather-related event doesn’t make or break a trend, climate change has played a role in the current snow drought.
Charlotte regularly saw over half a foot of snow each winter in the 1980s. These past few years, less than an inch has fallen. In some cases, it’s just bad luck: Snow requires cold air and moisture at the same time to form.
“There’s cases in the last couple winters when if it’d been a degree or two cooler maybe we could have gotten some snow,” Davis said.
According to Climate Central, Charlotte's average winter temperature is up 4.5 degrees since 1970.
“You got back to the late 1980s, this was a time when Charlotte would average almost 8 inches of snow per year,” Davis said.
The city’s last measurable snowfall was two-tenths of an inch on January 29, 2022. While meteorologists predict temperatures will remain low through the week, they aren’t seeing more snow in the future for Charlotte.
