FAYETTEVILLE — Residents of Northwest Arkansas awoke Friday to the first white Christmas in 26 years and the accompanying slippery roads and frigid winds.
It also was the first white Christmas for Fayetteville and Fort Smith simultaneously since the National Weather Service began keeping records for those cities more than a century ago.
From Fort Smith to the Missouri border, the area was blanketed with up to 4 inches of snow.
A weather spotter in Van Buren reported 7 inches, but Karen Hatfield, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tulsa, didn’t know if that was because of a cloud band that dumped extra snow in that area of Crawford County or if the measurement was taken in a snowdrift.
Official statistics didn’t mean much to area residents who ventured out to enjoy the snow, along with the freezing wind.
“It just makes Christmas Christmas,” said Maria Lanning of the snow as she helped her little sister Anya Grabovski, 5, ski down a hill at Wilson Park in Fayetteville on Friday morning.
A dozen kids were sledding on the hillside by 11 a.m. Christmas day. The sun was shining brightly and temperatures hovered near 20 degrees.
Police and emergency personnel reported no weather-related fatality accidents in Northwest Arkansas or Fort Smith on Christmas eve or Christmas day. There was a deadly crash in Fort Smith on Thursday night, but it appeared to be unrelated to the weather, police said.
Police also reported dozens of cars in ditches throughout the area. Jackknifed trucks on Interstate 40 near Ozark blocked eastbound traffic for hours, but state police never closed the highway and the injuries were not life-threatening.
The desire for a white Christmas has been romanticized since Bing Crosby sang Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” in the 1942 mov-ie Holiday Inn. The National Weather Service has another outlook.
The weather service defines a white Christmas as one where there’s at least an inch of snow on the ground at sunrise. Measurements are normally taken at 6 or 7 a.m., Hatfield said. If it snows more during Christmas day, that amount is counted, if it’s still on the ground, in the next day’s total.
Since the weather service began keeping records for Fayetteville in 1850, the city has had five white Christmases - in 1913, 1914, 1966, 1983 and 2009. Snowfall accumulation varied from one to four inches.
The weather service began keeping records for Fort Smith in 1873. Since then, the city has had four white Christmases - in 1963, 1975, 1990 and 2009. Accumulation varied from one to three inches.
It snowed four inches in Fayetteville on Christmas day 1975, but the snow fell after sunrise so the weather service didn’t define that day as a white Christmas. Fort Smith got 6.7 inches of snow on Christmas day 1975. Two inches of that amount were on the ground at sunrise, qualifying it as a white Christmas for Fort Smith.
Hatfield said a front that was heading for Arkansas stalled over Oklahoma on Thursday, dumping 14.1 inches of snow on Oklahoma City and 5.8 inches on Tulsa.
“You’ve been spared the worst of it because of little factors that set up over Oklahoma instead of Arkansas,” she said. “You guys did not see the prolonged duration of snowfall that we did.”
Wind gusts neared 60 mph in Oklahoma City when the storm hit. In Tulsa, wind whipped 40 to 45 mph, Hatfield said. In Fayetteville, the gusts were 35 to 40 mph.
S u n s h i n e a n d w i n d s helped melt the snow on some roadways Friday, buttemperatures stayed below freezing in Northwest Arkansas throughout the day.
Hatfield said the temperature would stay below freezing until Monday for Fayetteville, and that will keeps roads slippery. A chance of snow is back in the forecast for Tuesday night for Northwest Arkansas, but Hatfield said it will be a weaker front than the one that camethrough Christmas eve.
In Fort Smith, the temperature is forecast to be above freezing both today and Sunday, with high temperatures of about 36 degrees. Fort Smith also has a chance of snow Tuesday night, when the low dips to 28 degrees.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/26/2009