Christmas to be outright balmy, forecasters say

Mercury to top 70 degrees, near 80 in parts of Arkansas

Arkansas will see abnormally warm weather this Christmas and close to record-high temperatures for the time of year, according to National Weather Service meteorologists.

Much of Arkansas will be above 70 degrees Saturday, with no precipitation forecast. Temperatures are expected to reach 76 in Little Rock and Fort Smith, 74 in Fayetteville and 80 in the southeast corner of the state.

“It feels more like May than late December out there,” the National Weather Service’s Little Rock office tweeted Thursday. “Temperatures will remain well above normal through Christmas and into early next week.”

The Little Rock metropolitan area crossed the 70-degree threshold on Christmas Day most recently in 2019, but it doesn’t happen often, National Weather Service senior forecaster John Lewis said.

“It was 72 degrees in 1971, so there’s a 48-year gap there that shows you how rare that is,” he said.

This year will be only the fifth time that Christmas temperatures have been above 70 degrees in Little Rock since 1900, Lewis said. He noted that Little Rock also has seen some cold Christmases, with the lowest being 12 degrees in 1983.

The unusual temperatures come from an influx of warm air that traveled north from the Gulf Coast, said Caitlin Dirkes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Memphis, which covers Northeast Arkansas from Phillips to Clay counties.

The jet stream, or a concentrated area of strong winds at a high elevation, is much farther north of its usual December location in the U.S. this year, Dirkes said.

“Usually it’s further south this time of year, and that’s how we get colder weather from the northern part of the country, but this year it’s further north and we’re kind of stuck in a bubble of warm air,” she said.

Warmer Decembers are not likely to become normal for Arkansas in the near future, even though the one this year will likely not be the last, said Karen Hatfield, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Tulsa, which monitors west-central and Northwest Arkansas.

“The mid-70s that we’re forecasting for [today] right now are 20 to 25 degrees above our normal values for the date,” Hatfield said Thursday. “It’s still going to be unusual, so there’s no reason for me to think that it’s not going to happen again.”

This year’s warmth has created difficulties for the outdoor ice rink at Lawrence Plaza in Bentonville, manager Hannah Boydston said. The rink opened for public use every day of the week Nov. 20. It will be closed from Monday to Wednesday every week starting Jan. 24, and it will close for the season Feb. 13, Boydston said.

Higher temperatures often melt the top of the ice and create a thin layer of water that re-freezes overnight, and Bentonville’s Parks and Recreation department had to close the rink from Dec. 14-18 to rebuild the ice, Boydston said. The rink reopened Sunday.

“Today it’s kind of wet because the sun’s beating down, but anything over 60 [degrees], we have a hard time keeping it completely frozen,” she said.