Mobile is set to get a taste of a snowy holiday this weekend, even if it has to be manufactured. City officials, under Mayor Sandy Stimpson, are planning to bring six tons of artificial snow to Cathedral Square on Saturday for the Port City’s first official Winter Wonderland celebration.
The real thing has always been a much rarer sight downtown. According to the National Climatic Data Center, there is no record of an actual white Christmas — defined as at least an inch of snow on the ground on Dec. 25 — ever occurring in Mobile. National Weather Service records do show 0.13 inches of precipitation fell on Christmas Day in 2004, but that reading combined rain and drizzle along with a bit of snow and ice pellets, falling well short of a true snow-covered holiday.
Still, the region has seen its share of surprise winter weather over the decades, with scattered snow events documented dating back to 1958, according to local weather archives. Those rare flurries tend to become local legend precisely because they happen so infrequently along the Gulf Coast.
Don Shepherd, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Mobile, confirmed that a white Christmas is off the table again for 2014. But he noted that seasonal outlooks point to a colder and wetter stretch than usual across December, January and February. Rather than typical daytime highs in the low- to mid-60s, Shepherd said there’s a 40 percent chance the three-month winter period will run colder than average, along with a 30 to 40 percent chance the area sees more than its typical 15-plus inches of rainfall for the season.
Residents who lived through last winter’s brutal ice storm, which shut down interstates from Mobile to Tallahassee, Florida, can breathe easier this year. Shepherd described that event as unlike anything in the historical record and said forecasters aren’t anticipating a repeat performance of that scale this winter.
Even so, Mobile has been running unusually dry so far this December, with only 0.42 inches of rain recorded through the week. Shepherd said that’s expected to change quickly, with rain moving through the region Friday night into Saturday, potentially bringing a couple of inches, and another system expected to pass through around Dec. 23.
For now, the closest thing to snow most Mobile residents will see this season is likely to be the trucked-in variety piling up at Cathedral Square this weekend.