Could it ever snow on Christmas in Phoenix?

December brings many things to the Valley, like near-perfect weather and snowbirds flocking in from the Midwest. But a beautiful, thick layer of unvarnished snow is not one of them.

If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, ya got the wrong place. (For the snowbirds trying to escape the winter, you’ve picked wisely.) But you might wonder: Has there ever been Christmas snow in Phoenix?

According to the National Weather Service, the short answer is no — at least going back to 1896, when weather data was first recorded in Phoenix. But a snowy Christmas did come close to happening a few decades ago.

The last time there was a blip of snow on the ground in Phoenix was over two days just before Christmas in 1990. On Dec. 21 and 22 of that year, NWS measured a whopping total of 0.4 inches of snow.

There are only three other known occasions when Phoenix received more snow than that. In February 1939, Phoenix saw a half-inch of snow. The same decade — on Jan. 20, 1933, and Jan. 21, 1937 — the Valley received a full inch of snow.

There’s a reason those snowy Phoenix days almost all happened before World War II. These days, the conditions needed for snow in the Valley are increasingly improbable.

Matt Salerno, a meteorologist at Phoenix’s NWS office, told Phoenix New Times that the growing urbanization of the Phoenix metro area makes it unlikely we’ll be seeing snow again anytime soon.

“You need probably at least 24 hours of temperatures hovering around freezing to allow snow to stick,” Salerno noted. “Even when you’re close to freezing, the snow’s only going to stick on grassy surfaces and elevated surfaces where it stays cooler. When it falls onto concrete or pavement, it will melt off pretty quickly.”

The last time the Phoenix metro even reached freezing temperatures was January 2019.

But while the odds are low that snow will settle on the ground in the Phoenix metro area, the right conditions allow for snow at its far reaches.

“The farther that you live out in the Valley, the better chances you have of seeing snow, especially as you go north and east,” Salerno said.

That’s because on the outskirts of the Valley, precipitation can freeze and stay on the ground more easily than in the city. That includes areas like North Scottsdale and Cave Creek, where elevations can reach higher altitudes around 2,000 feet.

Elsewhere in the desert, snowfall can (for a brief and fleeting moment) stick around before it melts. 

For instance, Tucson is located at a higher elevation than Phoenix, at 2,800 feet, which makes a significant difference in terms of snowfall. Unsurprisingly, Tucson has received more of it. Two inches of snow fell on Arizona’s second-largest city in February 2019, and another inch came down in January 2021.