While the article title says "looking ahead" to the first snow of the season, Louisville has technically already seen its first snow! Yep, this past Tuesday, graupel was observed with hail and that technically is a form of snow. So, we officially saw a "Trace" of snowfall on Tuesday. 

Now that we're getting into the latter half of October and temperatures are starting to swing toward the cooler side as we get further and further into Fall, some of you may be wondering...when do we normally see our first snow of the year? What about our first 1" of snow? It might not be as far away as you think...

When Do We Normally See Our First Measurable Snow Of The Year?

This is a pretty popular question in our area. While we average our first trace of snow in November, we normally don't measure our first snow of the year until December 7th. Of course we have had years where we had measurable snow earlier and later than this date, but statistically this is our average first measurable snow.

When Do We Normally See Our First 1" Snow Of The Year?

Now we start to talk about the real snow. As you know, an inch of snow in our area can cause some real problems. I think many that have lived in snow belts think that 1" is not much, but our area definitely has problem with any 1"+ snows. The average first 1"+ snow of the year for our area is December 26. Think about that for a second... we don't average our first 1" snow for the area until AFTER Christmas.

When Do We Normally See Our First 4"Snow Of The Year?

This is really the stat that speaks to when we have our first "big" snow of the year on average. 4" of snow in our area can cause a whole lot of problems so this one is important. On average, we normally see our first 4" snow on January 19 or about half way through the meteorological winter. We absolutely can get some before, but it is clearly not the norm.

Here are a few more snow statistics for you: 

Earliest Snowfall: Trace on October 10, 1906. Our earliest sleet was a trace on October 3, 1980. (Note: A trace of frozen precipitation fell October 6, 1952, but it is unknown whether that was sleet, snow, or a mixture of the two. On that day Fort Knox reported only sleet, but Lexington did report snow.) That date has already passed now obviously for this year so we won't be breaking any snow records for earliest snowfall as we still haven't even been below freezing yet in Louisville. 

Earliest Measurable Snowfall: 1.4” on October 19, 1989

Latest Snowfall: Trace May 20, 1894

Latest Measurable Snowfall: 1.0” on May 6, 1898 (our only measurable May snowfall)