A white Christmas is looking more like a dream this year for many Canadians.
Most of Canada was forecast to experience a green Christmas, Environment Canada senior climatologist Dave Phillips said Wednesday.
It’s an occurrence not seen on such a national scale since Environment Canada began measuring snowfall levels 56 years ago, he said.
“It’s not going to feel and look like Christmas,” Phillips said. “People are going to have to work hard to create the mood that sometimes weather creates.”
The situation could still change, but most Canadians are likely to see grass, not snow, on their lawns, he said.
In Canada, a white Christmas is defined as when a community has two centimetres of snow on the ground at 7 a.m., local time, on Dec. 25, Phillips explained.
Most years, about 85% of Canada has a white Christmas, he said.
This year, the most populated areas of Canada will have no snow, too little snow to count, late-day flurries or puddles of melted snow caused by rising temperatures, Phillips said.
Cities all over Canada, including “Montreal, Halifax, Moncton, Saint John, Toronto, everything south of Toronto, Sudbury (Ont.), Sault Ste. Marie (Ont.), Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton,” won’t make the Christmas cut, he said.
“And Victoria, Vancouver, we don’t even have to talk about that. They only have about an 11 per cent chance of having a white Christmas,” Phillips said.
In Winnipeg, the coldest city in Canada, the temperature is expected to reach 1 C Sunday, he said. And residents of Gander, N.L., the snowiest city in the country, probably won’t be making snow angels after opening gifts, he added.
There are a few exceptions where people likely will see snow, such as most of the North and a few pockets across the country, including Quebec City, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., and the area north of Ottawa, he said.
But even those places generally have less snow on the ground than they would in a normal year, Phillips said.
“Yes, there may be a couple of places where there’s some decent population that just eke under the wire to get a white Christmas, but the depth will just be patchy, it really won’t count,” he said.
While a green Christmas this year doesn’t necessarily mean the same will occur next year, it’s a result of a general trend toward warmer and shorter winters in Canada, Phillips said, joking Canadians may need to start celebrating the holiday in January or February to see snow.
“If we’re looking at the reasons for it, I think climate change is certainly one,” he said.
It also just be part of a cycle in which a few colder, more snow-filled decades are followed by a few warmer ones, Phillips said. But since the trend toward milder, shorter winters is seen nationwide, climate change is more likely to blame.
Phillips said this year stands out in his mind along with 2008, when the whole country had a white Christmas, and 1997, when the Prairies had their only green Christmas to date.
But Phillips said he doesn’t necessarily mind a green Christmas, and most Canadians might agree, despite even the most ardent snow-haters often welcoming the snow for Christmas.
“I much prefer a green Christmas to a Christmas where you’ve got dirty snow and yellow-stained snow in the driveway with garbage looking through,” he said. “Yes, there’s two centimetres of snow, but my God, is it ever ugly.”
National Post
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