It’s rain right now. Will white Christmas arrive for Boise area or just in mountains?
Rain pelted Boise on Thursday morning as a precursor of precipitation forecast to drop on the Treasure Valley throughout the day and into the holiday weekend.
The area received about a tenth of an inch of rain, according to National Weather Service gauges. That brings the region up to about 11.6 inches year-to-date, which is roughly a half-inch above normal levels by this point, with more to come, said Les Colin, a Boise-based National Weather Service meteorologist.
As temperatures drop overnight into Friday, the rain is expected to turn to snow. Current predictions call for between a half-inch and inch of snow by sunrise in Boise with the mercury hovering around the mid-30s, Colin said.
“If it goes down 2 degrees from that, we could end up with 2 inches of snowfall overnight,” he told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “At higher elevations, they’ll get more. They could get 6 to 10 inches overnight from this one.”
On Thursday morning, Bogus Basin Mountain Recreation Area already boasted 4 inches of fresh snow in the past day, including 3 inches that fell after 5 p.m. Wednesday. The ski area has received 56 inches — more than 4.5 feet — of snow on the season, and has eight of its 10 lifts operating.
Snowfall in the Treasure Valley remains just ahead of normal for the month of December, but still behind by about 2 inches so far this year. About 4 inches have fallen this season around Boise, whereas the region has seen about 6 inches by this point in a typical year, according to National Weather Service data.
Following the initial round of snowfall arriving Friday, the ongoing cold front is still expected to deliver a white Christmas on Saturday, Colin said. Current projections call for upwards of an inch of snow.
“We’re going to get more, so we’ll almost certainly be ahead of normal by the end of the year,” he said of year-end snow totals. “But the ground will not be bare on Christmas Day. That’s how it looks now for the entire valley down here. At higher elevations, there will definitely be snow everywhere above about 3,000 feet.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2021 at 11:49 AM.
