A brown and soggy Christmas for most of Minnesota

Get ready for one of the weirder weather patterns in Minnesota this Christmas holiday.

You can see in the image above that much of Minnesota looks unusual for mid-December. In fact, soil temperature readings indicate the ground is still not frozen in much of southern Minnesota.

In December of 1982, I was studying abroad in Germany. But I remember people telling me that it was unusually warm with thunderstorms around Christmas.

The Minnesota State Climatology Office confirms that in their write-up of historical Christmas weather:

Perhaps the most bizarre weather conditions on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day occurred in 1982, when heavy rains with thunder and lightning hit the Twin Cities after dusk on the 24th and continued into the early morning hours of the 25th. The rain changed over to a slushy 1.4 inches of snow later in the morning of the 25th, but officially 1982 was a brown Christmas since the snow depth was measured at 6am and the change-over occurred after that. Christmas Day 2016 had a heavy thunderstorm in the evening with sleet and bright flashes of lightning.

The Christmas holiday weekend in 2023 looks to provide record warmth and unusual soaking rains. High temperatures near 50 on Christmas Eve in the Twin Cities will break the previous record high of 46 degrees.

Forecast models are cranking out various rainfall solutions. Many suggest widespread half-inch to local 1-inch rainfall totals. Here’s the Canadian model precipitation output through Tuesday: