A white Christmas is on the wish list of many, but this year's odds are looking slim unless you live in the Rockies or the northern tier of the United States.
In meteorology, a white Christmas occurs when there is at least 1 inch of snow on the ground Christmas morning. It doesn't have to be snowing on the holiday for that to happen.
While many areas of the U.S. have already seen snow this season, including parts of the South, much of that snowpack has already melted.
So who is most likely to unwrap presents in the presence of snow?
It's still early, but current indications point to a likely white Christmas in the northern and central Rockies. A white Christmas is also likely in northeastern North Dakota, northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as well as in northern New England, east of Lake Ontario in New York state and southeast of Lake Erie in southwestern New York, northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.
A white Christmas is possible in parts of the interior Northeast, Appalachians, the mountains of the West and in a stripe from the central Plains to the southern Great Lakes.
This outlook is based on current forecast models, and trends and will be updated as we get closer to Christmas.
How Typical Is a White Christmas?
You may be surprised to see there isn't a lot of territory outside the Mountain West, northern New England and the far northern tier where the odds of a white Christmas are greater than 50 percent.
Last year was the perfect example of that. The Lower 48 experienced the most widespread Christmas snow cover in five years even though just under 50 percent of the contiguous U.S. had snow on the ground early Christmas morning, according to an analysis from NOAA's National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (NOHRSC).
This was a slight increase compared to 2016, when 44 percent of the contiguous U.S. was covered by snow Christmas morning. Snow cover in 2016 was generally in typical areas unlike in 2017 when snow reached a bit farther south.
On average, about 40 percent of the Lower 48 states has snow on the ground on Christmas, according to 15 years of data compiled by NOAA's NOHRSC. Since 2003, those percentages have varied widely from year-to-year, from just over 21 percent in 2003 to a whopping 63 percent of the contiguous U.S. in 2009.