Snow and Freezes in Jacksonville

Yes, rarely: the National Weather Service's Jacksonville record shows a top yearly snowfall of 1.9 inches in 1899 and just 0.1 inch in 2025.

The NWS Jacksonville annual climate report for 2025, issued January 8, 2026, carries a climate record period of 1871 to 2026 and lists the record snowfall total as 1.9 inches in 1899. For 2025 it lists 0.1 inch of snowfall against a normal of 0.0, with one day of light snow and one day of sleet, and a trace the year before.

The storm that defines snow in Jacksonville came on December 23, 1989. The National Weather Service reports that 0.8 inch fell at the NWS office in Jacksonville, the second-highest storm total on record for what it calls this subtropical city. Just across town, Jacksonville Naval Air Station measured 1 inch and Jacksonville Beach 2.5 inches, and the storm-total table lists 2.9 inches at Mayport, the highest Duval County figure in it.

A 1055 millibar arctic high over Nebraska, an offshore low and humid air riding over the cold dome lined up over north Florida and Jacksonville on December 22, 1989.

The NWS Wilmington account says the arctic front had pushed into central Florida by the morning of December 22, with very cold air already spread across the Southeast ahead of a very strong 1055 millibar (31.15 inches) high centered over Nebraska. Humid southwest winds then developed over the top of the arctic air across Florida, Georgia and coastal South Carolina. Where the air near the ground was colder, to the north, snow or mixed precipitation began, and rain changed over to sleet in Jacksonville just after 6 p.m. Arctic air kept blasting south behind the low, with flurries as far south as Tampa and Daytona Beach.

The NWS calls it the largest snowstorm in history for the Southeast U.S. coast. It broke all-time snowfall records in Wilmington at 15.3 inches, Cape Hatteras at 13.3 inches, Charleston at 8 inches and Savannah at 3.6 inches, and measurable snow fell as far south as Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Key West reached 44 degrees, tying its coldest December temperature, and the page repeats newspaper reports of nearly total destruction of commercial citrus north of Interstate 4. Among Florida stations, the Jacksonville coast came out near the top.

Source: Florida column of the storm-total table on the NWS Wilmington Christmas 1989 snowstorm page, compiled from NWS and FAA stations and NWS cooperative observers.

Seven degrees, on January 21, 1985, is the record low in the National Weather Service's Jacksonville climate record.

The NWS Jacksonville annual climate report lists the record low as 7 on 01/21/1985, beside a record high of 104 on 07/11/1879. The NWS Wilmington page on that outbreak shows how Duval County's geography shaped the freeze: Jacksonville International Airport hit 7, the Mayport Pilot Station and Cecil Field 8, NAS Jacksonville 9 and Jacksonville Beach 14, while Fernandina Beach, just north in Nassau County, fell to 4.

Source: the Florida list of lows on the NWS Wilmington January 1985 cold page.

The outbreak was national. The NWS says the arctic front reached the Carolinas on the morning of January 20, 1985 and by that evening had pushed through all of Florida and into Cuba, and that January 21 shows up in most Carolina city record books as the lowest temperature ever observed. Florida's Secretary of Agriculture termed it the freeze of the century, with the state's citrus industry suffering $2.5 billion in losses, according to the same page. For Jacksonville, the 7 degree reading still stands as the floor of the record.

Jacksonville's share of the January 2025 storm was small: the NWS annual report records 0.1 inch of snow for the year, one light snow day and one sleet day.

The NWS Jacksonville annual report also lists the coldest reading of 2025 as 26 degrees on January 25, compared with 28 on January 21 the year before. The heavy snow fell well west. The NWS office in Tallahassee says the late January storm brought the most significant snowfall in decades to many Gulf Coast locations; Tallahassee recorded 1.9 inches over two days, second only to 2.8 inches in February 1958, and snow or sleet reached as far east as the I-75 corridor, still well west of Jacksonville and Duval County.

Farther west the totals were larger. The NWS Mobile storm report table lists 8.8 inches at Milton from a CoCoRaHS observer and 10.0 inches at Milton from a public report on January 21, 2025. Tallahassee reports that Interstate 10 in Florida closed for 70 miles on the night of the snow and then for nearly 200 miles as melted snow refroze, and that Pensacola fell to 13 degrees on January 22, a daily record low. None of those totals reached the Jacksonville area, where the annual report's single light snow day is the whole story.

Near Jacksonville and the Atlantic coast, a deep, warm melting layer aloft often turns snow into cold rain, as the National Weather Service showed on January 3, 2018.

The NWS Jacksonville summary of the January 3, 2018 winter storm explains the pattern. That morning, surface temperatures were at or below freezing along the I-10 corridor just west of the Jacksonville metropolitan area, and the storm produced snow, sleet and freezing rain across southeast Georgia and northeast Florida, with up to 3.5 inches of snow in southeast Georgia. The upper-air soundings from Tallahassee and Jacksonville told the story: near Jacksonville, along the Florida Atlantic coast and central Florida, the melting layer was deep and warm enough to melt all the snow particles, resulting in cold rain.

The February 1973 storm followed the same pattern. The NWS Wilmington page on the Great Southeastern Snowstorm of February 9 to 11, 1973 lists only a trace at Jacksonville International Airport, Jacksonville Naval Air Station and Cecil Field, with 0.1 inch at Fernandina Beach and 0.4 inch at Tallahassee Regional Airport. In 1989 the order of events was different, with the arctic air already in place across north Florida before the humid southwest flow arrived, and Mayport and Jacksonville Beach measured the most snow in Duval County.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the NWS Jacksonville annual climate report for 2025 and its January 2018 storm summary, the Wilmington office's 1973, 1985 and 1989 event pages, and the Tallahassee and Mobile offices' accounts of the January 2025 storm.