Warmth. Rain. Thunderstorms. Wind. Cold. Snow. It's all stuffed in the stocking of weather for the eastern U.S. this Christmas.
As a strong cold front and dynamic low-pressure system press eastward, this Christmas Eve and Christmas will present two faces ― a mild one and a cold one ― in quick succession to the eastern U.S., but neither particular face will be nearly the extreme of what can and has happened on the holiday.
The Christmases of 1982 and 1983 provide one of the sharpest juxtapositions imaginable for weather in much of the central and eastern U.S., essentially marking the bookends for the warmest and coldest weather patterns possible in the yuletide season.
For several cities in the South, Ohio Valley and East Coast regions, records for warmest and coldest temperatures on Dec. 25 were set in those consecutive years and remain on the books with temperature differences between the two Christmases exceeding 70 degrees in multiple cases.
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Knoxville, Tenn., saw a temperature difference of 82 degrees between its Dec. 25, 1982, high of 76 and its Dec. 25, 1983, low of minus-6.
Washington, D.C., experienced one of its only two 70-degree Christmases in 1982, with a high of 70 at what is now Reagan National (second warmest on record, trailing 72 in 1964). The next Christmas brought bone-chilling cold to the nation’s capital, with a low of 3 in D.C. that remains the coldest Christmas temperature on record.
A look at the dominant weather patterns for Christmas 1982 and 1983 instantly reveals why they were so extremely different.
In 1982, a dome of high pressure was present over the southeastern U.S., with unseasonably warm air underneath. Meanwhile, a deep low-pressure system set up aloft over northern Mexico. The flow of air between these two systems was sharply from the south-southwest, bringing subtropical air from off the western coast of Mexico across the central and eastern U.S.
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A historically strong El Niño was present, as a stripe of equatorial Pacific waters warmed to what up to that time was the highest observed sea surface temperatures. El Niño is often linked to an intensification of the subtropical branch of the jet stream which can bring warm and wet weather patterns across the southern half of the U.S.
A tornado outbreak resulted in more than 40 confirmed tornadoes in several Southern states from Dec. 23-25, 1982, and three deaths in Arkansas and Missouri. The same general region had also experienced a similar round of tornadoes and extreme flooding in the first week of December. In one bizarre case, a Missouri man died on Christmas Eve in a tornado that hit a trailer on a site where his family’s house had been destroyed by a previous tornado on Dec. 2.
A remarkably similar pattern to 1982 showed up around Christmas in 2015. It, too, occurred during a strong El Niño that eventually surpassed the intensity of the 1982-83 El Niño and resulted in widespread warm temperatures across much of the central and eastern U.S., some of which supplanted Christmas week records set in 1982. There was also a round of tornadoes, including a Dec. 23-25 outbreak in the Deep South.
By contrast, in 1983, a piece of the polar vortex had split off and relocated over eastern Canada. The resulting flow between it and high pressure over western North America brought steeply angled north-northwest wind flow from the Arctic Circle deep to the south in the central and eastern U.S., resulting in remarkably frigid temperatures during the holiday season just a year after yuletide swelter.
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In southern regions that had experienced tornadoes a year before, ice jammed rivers. Extreme lake effect snow buried some areas near the Great Lakes in feet of snow as temperatures plummeted below zero.
Elsewhere, no big snowstorms developed out of the 1983 Arctic blast, but several light to moderate snow and ice events provided a sparkly, crusty white Christmas to locations in the South that rarely experience one.
A similar Arctic outbreak occurred at Christmas six years later, supplanting some of 1983′s record Christmas lows, including at Dulles International, which recorded minus-2 in 1983 and minus-4 in 1989. A coastal storm provided a historic huge pre-Christmas snowfall to locations along the coast of the Carolinas.
But Christmas 1983′s extreme cold holds firm as the record setter at many locations from the Mississippi River Valley to the Mid-Atlantic, extending from the Great Lakes to Florida.
The unique blend of contrasts for Christmas present and the juxtaposed extremes of consecutive holidays in Christmas past prove that, with holiday weather, all is not calm, it’s not always merry and bright, nor will all your Christmases be white.
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