What are the odds SC will see a white Christmas? Here’s the latest NWS forecast

As close as the Midlands will come to a white Christmas this year is hearing Bing Crosby sing it.

“The news isn’t good,” Steve LaVoie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Columbia, said Friday. “We’re more likely to have a green Christmas than a white Christmas.”

He put the odds at less than 1%. To further make the point, he said, “highly unlikely.”

That doesn’t mean no precipitation.

The forecast calls for “gray with some or all of South Carolina seeing rain,” said Frank Strait, the severe weather liaison for the S.C. State Climate Office.

LaVoie expects rain to begin in Columbia on Christmas night.

The Midlands is just not prone to a holly jolly snowscape. National Weather Service records begin in 1887 and no significant snowfall has occurred in the Midlands since. There was a trace in 1924.

The most significant weather event the State Climate Office recorded in recent years was heavy snow along the coast in 1989 from Dec. 22-24, 1989. Myrtle Beach had 14 inches, Charleston 8, Beaufort 5.

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