So Long November, Hello December

Today we will wrap one of the wettest Novembers on record here in Alabama. At deadline time, the current rain total for Birmingham this month is 10.47”, and this is the third wettest November on the books. To get to second place, we will need 4.22” of rain between now and midnight tonight. Unlikely, but stranger things have happened. For the year, we are now at 57.03”, well above the normal amount we see in an entire year. Down in Mobile, the total for 2004 is a whopping 72.58”.

Looking ahead to December, we are still in our late fall tornado season, although generally speaking severe weather is not as likely during the second half of the month as the air gets cooler and more stable. The normal rain total here for December is 4.47”, and the wettest December on record came in 1961 when 13.98” was measured in Birmingham.

By the end of December, our normal high drops to 53, and the normal low 33. The coldest temperature measured during the month came 15 years ago, on December 23, 1989, when the mercury dropped to one degree at the Birmingham Airport.

Dreaming of a white Christmas? For Birmingham, where over 100 years of weather records exist, there has never been a white Christmas in the classic sense. Perhaps the closest resemblance to a white Christmas in Birmingham was in December, 1985. Flurries falling across north-central Alabama on Christmas Eve and early Christmas morning lightly dusted some areas around here, but snow was not deep enough to measure. Weather records show that 5.5 inches of snow fell at the city office way back on December 22, 1929. On December 24th, there was still 2.5 inches of snow on the ground at 7 :00 p.m. However, most of the snow melted Christmas Day when the temperature climbed to 51 degrees.