Cold & Snow don’t always go together in the winter around Charlotte.

I just released my 9th annual Winter forecast over on wcnc.com. You can view it by clicking here. My forecast basically is for a near average to slightly above average temperature winter with near to slightly below average snow and ice. The big caveat is I do think it will be a wet winter. Which means we will have an active storm track and lots of moisture around. I’m just not convinced that the cold air will be persistent. So this doesn’t necessarily mean no snow, in fact there’s a very good chance we will have bigger snow storm potential this season. It’s just that in-between the active storms it will be mild, because you see cold air usually means arctic high pressure parked over the region most of the winter. Those are typically very dry. When you have an active storm track low pressure tends to bring warm air up on the front side of the system before the cold air and storm arrives.

To show you that cold and snow aren’t an exact correlation around here I’ll show you the stats. You have to remember these are seasonal averages for the winter months Dec-Feb. If we get 4 big snow storms that dump loads of snow separated by warm weather. We easily could have a mild winter with above average snow. To illustrate this look at the winter climatology for Charlotte. The coldest winters don’t always match up with the snowiest winters. Sure there have been some and ideally for snow lovers you’d love cold and wet, but you can still have lots of snow with normal to slightly above normal temperatures.

Last 30 winters, Temperatures vs Precipitation vs Snow:

Here’s the top 20 coldest winters vs the top 20 snowiest winters. I highlighted where they overlapped. Notice the bottom of the list of snowiest winter occurred outside the coldest winters.