This tempestuous December so far has left a trail of damage in powerful winds, heavy rainfalls, snow and even blizzards. And it looks like the atmosphere could remain turbulent and cold for some time. So is this a good time to put a bet on a white Christmas?
William Hill has already cut its odds of a white Christmas, with Glasgow and Edinburgh joint 3-1 favourites, London at 6-1 and Bristol and Cardiff at 7-1. A white Christmas doesn’t necessarily mean a Dickensian scene from A Christmas Carol, with widespread snow falling and lying thick on the ground. The bookies set the bar fairly low and all that’s needed is just one snowflake falling any time in the 24 hours of Christmas Day, and the flake doesn’t even need to settle on the ground.
There’s a catch, of course, and the location for that snowflake has to be very specific to a given location, including some well-known places such as Buckingham Palace and Edinburgh Castle.
Although snow in December in Britain is not as frequent on average as in the other winter months, the temperature of the air doesn’t have to be sub-zero and only needs to be below 4C. In fact, the heaviest snowflakes fall between 0C and 2C, when slight melting around the edges of the flakes makes them stick together into a big heavy snowflake.
The best of the snowy Christmases in the past few years was in 2017, when 11 per cent of UK weather stations reported snow falling, although it didn’t settle on the ground. Far better in recent memory was 2010 when snow fell on Christmas Day at about a fifth of weather stations, and snow was already lying on the ground in a bitterly cold and snowy December.
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There are now 16 days to go before Christmas Day but it is still too early to give a helpful general weather forecast, let alone one for specific locations. But at present the long-range outlook on December 25 doesn’t look too promising, with no suggestion of anything like snowy weather.
