Charleston, SC weather

Active alerts for Charleston’s county

• High Surf Advisory

  Marine · 1d left

  Coastal Bryan; Coastal Chatham; Coastal Liberty; Coastal McIntosh; Beaufort; Coastal Colleton; Charleston; Coastal Jasper

Relayed from the National Weather Service. Every active warning. For anything affecting your safety, use weather.gov.

Winter in Charleston

Charleston sees essentially no snow in an average year, according to NOAA’s 1991-2020 climate normals - a essentially snowless place. Measurable snow is close to unheard of. On the rare occasion it falls, everything stops.

That is why local snowfall thresholds differ so much from one town to the next: a district that plans for 0 inches a year is equipped differently from one that never sees any. Here, roughly 0.5 inches in a single storm is where a normal school day comes under threat.

Upper air over Charleston

The nearest radiosonde launch is Charleston, about 10 miles away. A weather balloon goes up twice a day and measures temperature, humidity and wind all the way through the atmosphere - which is what forecasters actually read to judge whether storms will fire, and how a surface forecast was arrived at.

Read the CHS sounding