According to scientists, even Mars will get a white Christmas before Southern California. Scientists studying the polar ice caps of Mars say a wintery looking snow will fall from the sky onto Mars.

“Yeah, it will be a white Christmas on the south pole of Mars,” said Paul Hayne of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and coauthor of a paper about Martian snowfall in the journal Icarus.

The white Christmas won’t exactly be like the snow-white Christmas that say Boston or New York might get this year. Mars has a very dry climate made up 95 percent carbon dioxide. That gas can freeze to form clouds that create its own version of snow in the polar ice caps.

The temperature needs to dip to -199 degrees Fahrenheit in Mars’ thin air for the carbon dioxide to condense to form ice, which is mainly in the polar regions, according to Tohoku University scientists.

“This process significantly changes the total mass of the Martian atmosphere. Measurements from Viking landers showed annual variations of 25 percent in the surface pressure, with the maximum pressure being observed around the northern winter solstices, and the minimum in the northern summers,” said Takeshi Kuroda of Tohoku University.

“It has no analogue on Earth. (On Mars) the air around you is getting thinner,” said Hayne. The only other places in the solar system where the atmosphere seasonally freezes to the ground is perhaps Neptune’s moon Triton and Pluto.

Hayne and his colleagues used cloud data from the Mars Climate sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to determine how much wintertime dry ice gets deposited by the “snowfall” at the planet’s poles. They had to approach the question in two ways. First they calculated how many ice particles were in the air using the Martian cloud thickness.

“Once you have that number you can calculate how fast clouds would fall to the surface,” Hayne said. “When we did that it was around 10 percent.”

They then took the atmosphere’s cooling rate and convert that into the rate of snow that forms in the clouds. The way this works is that heat gets released when the gas changes into a solid, and cools the air. From that, the scientists were able to determine that roughly 10 percent of the seasonal ice came from snowfall.

“As far as I know nobody has seen CO2 particles on the surface,” said Hayne.