Even The Yukon is Snowless

I got an email this morning from D. & S. in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. They say:

For any of you who aren't up on your Canadian geography, the Yukon is the Canadian province next to Alaska (about at the middle of this Google map, south central Yukon Territory).

Above is an image from the Yukon Convention Bureau, reminding us out that Whitehorse is waaaaaaaay far away from any other cities in Canada. :) All jokes aside, it's quite pretty there actually - check out this webcam (if you can stand that site design, yikes).

Above is an image from UCAR showing the current snow cover for North America. Note that there is an area of very little snowcover (2-10 centimeters) around Whitehorse (which is indicated by the "X" to the south of Alaska).

One has to, of course, take climatology (weather history) into account before reaching any conclusions. I couldn't find anyone who had a snow cover or snow fall anomaly map... both the U.S. and Canadian governments do this but it generally runs a couple months behind. What I did find that was helpful on the SOCC site was the average snow cover for December and January. Those maps indicate that south-central Yukon ought to have 20-40 cm on the ground, so they are indeed suffering from a snow drought.

Looking in the official AccuWeather.com Climate database (from our Pro site), this lack of snow is confirmed. As of Thursday, the official reporting station in Whitehorse has only 2" of snow on the ground and they got only 6.5" of snow in December. That station's average daily temperature was 17 degrees above normal on New Years Day and they ended up 14.3 above normal for the entire month of December (swinging up to 33 above normal on one of the days). That's pretty incredible -- the number looks crammed into the page online because we figured that it would be quite rare to have a double digit departure when we wrote the page.

Is this lack of snow cover a trend? There's an interesting article on the SOCC site that explores this possibility -- and it was written several years ago.

I'm sorry to say that the storm track remains south of the Yukon for the forseeable future, so D. & S. are going to have to wait a while longer for a major snowstorm.

But hey, I'm no Canadian weather expert. For continued updates on Canadian Weather, follow Brett Anderson (PREMIUM | PRO), who notes in his column today that January has also been warm at points east: