Twin Cities headed for another brown Christmas

(FOX 9) - Barring anything unforeseen, it looks like it is going to be the fourth brown Christmas in the last eight years. 

The simple math would tell us that we are getting a white Christmas just 50 percent of the time. That is well below what we have seen on average over the last 150 years. Three out of every four Christmases, or roughly 75 percent, should be white in the Twin Cities, according to climatology. But, even in the last few years, we have had a HUGE range of snow cover.

A white Christmas is defined by the National Weather Service as having at least 1 inch of snow on the ground at the 7 a.m. observation on Christmas morning. 

We had about an inch of snow last year making it officially white. In 2016, there were 4 inches on the ground, but it actually rained most of the day if you remember that weirdness. Even further back, we had two brown Christmases in 2015 and 2014 preceded by a 9-inch snow cover the year before that. 

But, remember 2010? A pretty incredible year with two large storms coming just days before Christmas giving us a 19-inch snow cover Christmas morning and wrecking travel across most of the Upper Midwest for days. That year, we had the second deepest snow pack ever on Christmas. The record is 20 inches set in 1983.

Amazingly, before the madness of 2010, both 2009 and 2007 had several inches of snow fall on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day--the only two times that has happened since 1950.