Albuquerque faces another warm Christmas

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Christmas is just 5 days away and it sure doesn’t feel like it.

Temperatures in Albuquerque this week should climb to the mid and upper 50s most days. That’s about 10 degrees above normal.

It’s not too long ago where there was another warm Christmas day – in 2017, the high temperature was 62. The average high is 46.

"That 62 degrees was exceptionally high, much warmer than normal. In fact, it falls just shy of a record. 63 degrees I believe is the all-time record high for Christmas day,” said NWS Senior Forecaster Todd Shoemake.

The coldest high temperature was 21 degrees in 1924. That same year, the low temperature was 8 degrees below zero.

One of the coldest Christmas days recorded in New Mexico was in Dulce, where the low temperature was 42 below zero in 1924.

Now let’s talk about the chance of seeing a white Christmas in Albuquerque any given year. It depends on how you define it. If it’s the chance of seeing snowflakes falling, that’s about 4%.

What about for an inch of snow on the ground? It’s even less than that.

The only time 1 inch of snow was recorded in New Mexico on Christmas Day was in 1962.

"I think people might be a little bit surprised by that," Shoemake said. "They think back to 2006 when we had a really snowy period but that actually fell between Christmas day and New Year’s. The 29th and 30th of December, we had significant snowfall actually set a daily record I believe, and had about 16.5 inches of snowfall over a 2-day period."

So there can be big storms in Albuquerque this time of year, but for this year, that doesn’t look to be the case.