Where this Christmas will rank in Montgomery’s weather history

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - This Christmas will go down as one of the coldest ever recorded in Montgomery. The high will be in the upper 30s after a morning spent in the upper teens.

But it won’t break a record. Somehow the daily records -- lows and highs -- will not fall with this shot of arctic air. That includes Christmas Day’s records.

This Christmas will still rank up near the top of the list. The coldest Christmas ever recorded in Montgomery came in 1983. That’s when the high temperature was only 25° and the low temperature was a frigid 5°.

We haven’t had a Christmas with highs in the 30s since 1990! You have to go back even farther to 1985 to find the last Christmas where lows dropped below 20 degrees.

On the flip side there have been some very warm Christmases in Montgomery. It has reached 80 degrees three times since records began. The temperature has reach at least 70 degrees on Christmas Day a total of 21 times.

On some of the warmer Christmases we also had to deal with dangerous thunderstorms in Alabama. There have been occasions where severe weather and tornadoes happened on or near Christmas.

There have been some rainy Christmases, too. The rainiest one happened recently in 2012. Christmas that year brought a little under two inches of rain! I bet Santa Claus needed all of the rain gear imaginable that year!

In terms of snow on Christmas, it just doesn’t happen around here. Two years featured a “trace” of snow. That means there wasn’t enough to measure, but snowflakes did fly. Those years were 1953 and 2010.

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