The American City Where People Are Most Likely to Have a White Christmas

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 20, 7:30AM EST

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The American City Where People Are Most Likely to Have a White Christmas — © USGirl / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

No one thinks the places most likely to have a white Christmas are in Alabama, Florida, Hawaii or Louisiana. The temperatures there can hit over 70 degrees in late December. Most people would guess that the northern tier of states would be on a list. Christmas can be more than white in these areas. Buffalo was hit by five feet of snow on Christmas 2001.

Climate change may play a role in which places get snow on Christmas. The NOAA expects much of the northern United States to be warmer than usual this winter. The exception is the northwest. The only states expected to get more precipitation than normal this winter are in the central Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

Reviewing Rent.com’s data, 24/7 Tempo has picked the major American city with the best chance of a Yuletide snowfall. While Rochester and Buffalo may be on our finalist list, they are hardly the cities that will see the most snow if it does arrive. Their average historic snowfall on Christmas day there is a mere 2.2 and 2.9 inches, respectively.

Rent.com based its computations on an integrated database of land surface weather stations maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information’s Global Historical Climatology Network. The data covered a 184-year period, from 1836 to 2020, considering city-level information aggregated for stations within specific areas for the 100 largest U.S. cities by population. (Data wasn’t available for every year and location.)
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The probability of snow on Christmas was calculated by dividing the total number of entries for December 25 across all years for a given city by the number of entries where station readings revealed any snowfall. Average snowfall on Christmas was computed by dividing station snowfall readings by the number of entries for the aggregation that was greater than zero.

The city most likely to have a white Christmas is Rochester, New York. Here are the details:

Probability of a white Christmas: 48.4%
Average snowfall on December 25: 2.2 inches
Population: 205,695

Click here to see all the American cities most likely to have a white Christmas.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.