New Year's Eve

New Year's Day is technically the holiday, but I figure that New Year's Eve is the day that people spend more time outside, so it's the one that we'll be looking at.

Temperatures

In the last 30 years, the average high on New Year's Eve has been -8°C, with an average low of -16°C. Thinking back just one week, on Christmas Day the average is quite a bit warmer, with a high of -3°C and an low of -12°C

That being said, for some reason I tend to think of New Year's as not being super-cold, even though in recent years 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2013 have all dropped below -20°C. But the last few years have been pretty warm, with 2014 and 2015 both around 3°C.

And as with Christmas, the coldest New Year's Eve was also way back in the 1880s, at -42.8°C in 1884.

Precipitation

When we looked at Christmas Day, it had been mostly precipitation-free recently. But for New Year's eve the chances of getting snow have been about 50/50. There hasn't been a major, 10cm snow on New Year's since 1967 though.

Snow of the Ground

The amount of snow on the ground is similar (not surprisingly) to what we saw with Christmas Day: from 1997 through 2005 it was pretty low fluctuating between 0cm and 10cm, but more recently we've fluctuated between about 5cm and 30cm.