Snow in downtown Phoenix: It happened a couple of times
Picture this: You are downtown and walk outside. You see strange flakes falling from the sky and they are not soot.
Weather records attest that it actually happened in Phoenix at noon Nov. 19, 1919. Yes, snow fell in Phoenix that day and time — a whole 0.1 inch!
It was not normal. In fact, that was the earliest it had snowed in Phoenix since the U.S. weather station was established here. (It snowed 0.2 inches in March 1917, but it melted far too quickly to be any fun.)
I recently spent 10 days in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the geographic center of North America, and became well-acquainted with huge mounds of snow, gray days, and very cold temperatures. For this Valley resident, snow is best in the mountains so one can ski or sled. Fortunately, it rarely happens in Phoenix
After the November 1919 surprise downtown, it flurried enough to count again the following year. But nothing significant fell to the ground again until 1933. On Jan. 20 of that year, it actually snowed for nearly two hours in the evening and the weather bureau reported 1 inch. Too bad the temperature rose and the precipitation turned to rain and destroyed the snow.
Four years later almost to the day, it snowed again in Phoenix. But this time during the day and that 1 inch of white stuff stuck for several hours so children and adults had fun making snowmen and having snowball fights. Great fun for all the desert dwellers who were not used to such weather. If you lived farther out from town, you might have experienced up to 4 inches.
And looking back over the past 80-plus years, those two instances, 1933 and 1937, have been Phoenix’s heaviest recorded snowfall.
A half-inch or less of flurries, while recorded by the weather bureau, are not much to brag about to friends and relatives.
Donna Reiner is the co-author of three books on Phoenix history.
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