Brown Christmas

I never expected my first Christmas in Grand Forks to be brown, but that's what I am going to get. I feel unlucky to not see the 3rd White Christmas of my life (1989 - Cambridge, MD; 2009 - Shawnee, KS) since Grand Forks has ~90% probability of a White Christmas. Oh well, more than likely I will see one next year.

I have updated the climate data on the right side. As you can see the crazy warmth continues thanks to this awful weather pattern for those of us who love snow. There are signs of  change coming up by New Year's as a the Pacific Northwest is progged to get blasted by a few big storms - finally breaking down the ridge out west and providing more of a zonal flow. Now instead of all the clipper systems missing us to the north and northeast, they may finally start to track through the Dakotas and provide some snow cover. The 12z Euro was quite ambitious with a decent snow storm on 12/30, with roughly 6-8" progged. Seems like too much QPF and the 00z GFS continues to be far less aggressive. As the saying goes, "drought begets drought", so I will not get too optimistic for any significant snow until we get a large scale hemispheric pattern change that is more conducive for normal winter weather here in the Dakotas.