Will The UK Have A White Christmas? The Met Office Has Spoken

Nigella Lawson’s first food entry for Vogue in 1995 reads: “There is nothing worse than going out for Christmas lunch and finding someone’s done something interesting.”

She says we should ignore any impulses to attempt fancy seafood or a “fun” side; classic is best during the festive season, she wrote, and in general, I agree.

I just wish the weather, which frankly owes us a white, snowy Christmas day after the plagues it’s besieged us with this year, shared that belief. 

After all, festive snowfall is never guaranteed, but the Met Office has recently shared the answer to what they call “the question [they] get asked the most.”

And?

Unfortunately, it’s too early to call, the weather hub says. 

“It’s not until the week before Christmas that we should start to have an idea about the chances of seeing any flurries on the big day,” they explain (though to be fair, that’s terrifyingly soon). 

Though you might have read about Arctic chills and incoming snowstorms, the Met Office says those headlines are likely based on inaccurate, unlikely, or incomplete data. 

One of their meteorologists, Aidan McGivern, explained: “What meteorologists actually do, is rather than cherry pick one computer model run for more than two weeks’ time, the computer models are run lots and lots of times and then we can pick out areas where they are agreeing and areas where they are disagreeing.”

“Then we can talk about likely weather patterns and less-likely weather patterns, common themes and so on,” he continued. 

Snow is even harder to predict than other kinds of weather, the Met Office say, because tiny temperature changecan make the difference between white flakes and grey sleet.

Why is snow so hard to forecast in the UK?

Snow is hard to predict in the first place, the University of Reading agrees, but the UK’s location makes a tough job even trickier. 

That’s because we’re located at the meeting point of a lot of global weather systems, and the winds that bring in cold weather (often Northerly or Easterly) are different to the ones that tend to give us out rain (predominantly Westerly). 

So we may get frigid cold weather that’s not moisture-laden enough to create snow, or wet weather that’s not cold enough to turn into snowflakes.

“A lot of the rain that we see in the UK, at all times of year, was snow when it started falling, but has fallen into air that is warmer than 0⁰C and melted,” the University of Reading continue. 

They add that though weather predictions are accurate to within a couple of degrees, that’s not always enough wiggle room to make a definitive call: “When your baseline is 0℃ then a rise of 2⁰C will mean the snow melts and we get rain. But 2⁰C colder and it’s just snow. Somewhere in the middle creates sleet.” 

That means even the forecast a week prior to Christmas day may not be able to predict snow accurately ― but hopefully, we’ll give meteorologists a little slack, seeing as they’re up against a barrage of unhelpful conditions.