There's a chance of snow in the forecast on Christmas Day this year.
RELATED: Denver weather forecast
But how often do we see flakes on Christmas?
The National Weather Service has been tracking snow data for more than a century, and white Christmases are actually pretty rare in Denver. But just how rare depends on your definition.
If you consider having snow blanket the ground a white Christmas, the National Weather Service says there have been 45 Christmas days with an inch of snow or more in the 118 years since depth measurement record keeping began in 1900.
This works out to about 38 percent of the time.
Over just the last 30 years, there has been an inch of snow on the ground 53 percent of the time, or on 16 of those Christmases.
However, if you consider a white Christmas as snow falling from the sky on Dec. 25, the chances of chances drop quite a bit.
The National Weather Service says that it has snowed on Christmas only about 15 percent of the time, or on 20 Christmas days in the 136 years since snowfall measurement began in 1882.
According to the NWS, over the last 30 years, Denver has received measurable snowfall on Christmas seven times or 23 percent of the time.
There was a Christmas Eve storm that left 1 to 4 inches of snow across Northeast Colorado last year and in 2016, a brief Christmas day storm brought trace amounts of snow to parts of Denver and a few inches in the northeast plains.
The most snow ever recorded on the ground in Denver on Christmas Day was 24 inches, which was measured after the Christmas Eve blizzard of 1982, the National Weather Service says.
Here are the top five greatest snow depths measured on Christmas since 1900:
- 1982: 24 inches on the ground
- 1913: 19 inches on the ground
- 2006: 15 inches on the ground
- 1973: 11 inches on the ground
- 1918: 11 inches on the ground
The NWS says the heaviest snowfall on Christmas Day was 7.8 inches in 2007.
Here are the five greatest snowfalls on Christmas Day since 1882:
- 2007: 7.8 inches of snow fell
- 1894: 6.4 inches fell
- 2014: 3.4 inches fell
- 2015: 2.3 inches fell
- 1912: 1.7 inches fell
See a breakdown of all the data from the National Weather Service: http://1.usa.gov/1mycyOL.
