DETROIT – Our forecast gets very wintry, very quickly with the coldest, windiest and snowiest conditions on Christmas Day.
Quick warm up
Temperatures will spike to their highest point of the forecast on Wednesday.
We’ll be flirting with 50 in the afternoon, despite starting in the low 30s. The record is 59, by the way, so we won’t break it. We’ll still be about 15 degrees above normal for the day, however.
Daylight hours will be dry, but our winter game changer arrives in the evening, first delivering rain. That precipitation turns to snow overnight and leads into the Christmas holidays.
Wintry & windy Christmas
If you had any notion of hosting a family Christmas dinner on the deck with heaters or a fire pit, let me disabuse you of that thought. Not to be a Grinch, but you’ll want to be cozy inside this year.
We’ll wake up to less than an inch of snow on Christmas Eve morning. As the main system pulls away, we’ll spend several hours dry, before winds kick up in the evening, bringing lake-effect snow showers that will hang around off-and-on through Christmas Day. So the chances of a White Christmas are there, but the places that see one will be sporadic.
Those winds will gust over 30 mph at times. So wind chills will start Christmas morning and the 26th in single digits, only feeling as warm as the teens in the afternoon. Christmas Eve’s high will come before sunrise, then temperatures will fall through the 20s during the day. Christmas Day’s high will only make it to the mid 20s.
Minor recovery
We’ll come out of those frigid conditions over the weekend. Temperatures will be closer to normal with dry conditions both days, until a mix of rain and snow arrives late on Sunday. That will transition to snow Monday leaving us with some minor accumulation.