Last weekend, for the second time in my life, I took a Eurostar train back to a snowy England in December.
We were hoping for snow during our weekend in Bruges. It was bitterly cold but the postcard scenes did not materialise in Belgium. On the way home we emerged from the Channel Tunnel to find snow falling in Kent instead.
The widespread December snowfall has brought some festive joy to many and raised hopes that this Christmas might be a white one after all.
How likely is a white Christmas in Britain?
The short answer is that it depends on where you live.
A longer answer can be found in the Met Office’s HadUK-Grid data. This plots various climate data such as temperature, sunshine hours and rainfall on grid squares across the UK, so you can see how much each particular area gets.
We are interested in what the Met Office term ‘days of snow lying’. These are the number of days where more than half an area is covered in snow at nine o’clock in the morning.
This is not the precise definition of a white Christmas, which is one when snow falls rather than already lying on the ground. I prefer it to get a true picture of a winter wonderland. I’m sure most of us would prefer a landscape blanketed with snow rather than a brief flurry on an otherwise dry day.
The 30 year average
Let’s start looking at the average for the month of December over the past thirty years:
The areas of darker blue show where more snow tends to accumulate in December. These tend to be upland areas which get more rain, less sunshine and lower temperatures. The darkest blue in the north of Scotland is around the Cairngorm mountains.
You can expect snow lying around up in the Cairngorms for around 14 days in a typical December in parts. That’s almost one day in every two that month, so you stand a good chance of a white Christmas in these remote, windswept Scottish mountains.
There are patches of navy in hilly areas further south such as the Pennines in northern England, the Welsh hills and Dartmoor in Devon.
The snowiest towns in Britain
If you want the best chance of a white Christmas in Britain without freezing on a mountaintop, head to Aviemore.
The town lies some miles northwest of Ben Macdui, Britain’s second highest mountain. It is home to the country’s only free-grazing herd of reindeer, which gives you some idea of its climate.
Aviemore gets 10.4 days of snow on the ground every December.
Kingussie and Grantown-on-Spey, two nearby towns, are the second and third snowiest in Britain with 9.0 and 8.3 days respectively.
Further south in England the snowiest town is Stanhope in Weardale, County Durham. Stanhope gets 6.3 snowy days each December on average. Nearby Wolsingham is third on the list while second is Alston in Cumbria. Not coincidentally Alston is also claimed to be the ‘highest market town in England’.
In Wales the title goes to Blaenau Ffestiniog, in mountainous Snowdonia, with 4.3 days per December.
Ghosts of Winters Past
The coldest, most wintry winters I can remember are those of 2009/10 and 2010/11.
Between 17 December 2009 and 15 January 2010 Britain experienced its most wintry spell since the early 1980s. There was more than 30cm of snow in some hilly areas in northern England and Scotland at times.
In Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands the temperature fell to -22.3°C on the night of 7th/8th January, which was the coldest temperature recorded in this country since 1995.
Here are the snowfall maps for December 2009 and January 2010:
The Scottish mountains resembled Canada or Norway in January 2010. Snow covered the ground almost permanently that month across a vast swathe of northern Scotland.
We can see from the scales that the whole of Britain experienced far more snow than normal that winter.
In fact, on 7th January the entirety of Great Britain was blanketed in snow, leading to this picture from a NASA satellite that resembled a scene from The Day After Tomorrow:
Britain had a second cold winter in 2010/11. This one had much the same results: much more snow than normal, massive disruption across the whole country and very low temperatures.
Snow is becoming less frequent in Britain
Over a fifty year period the number of snowy days in Britain has fallen.
In the 1970s the average place in the UK could expect to have about 17 to 18 days each year covered in snow. By 2021 that had fallen to around 12 days on average.
The Met Office has said that the ten years between 2012 to 2021 were about 1°C warmer on average than 1961 to 1990 in this country.
This makes a difference: during those 10 years we had 21 per cent fewer days of air frost (when the temperature doesn’t get above freezing) than we did between 1961 to 1990.
Christmas Present
The current outlook for Friday to Sunday (23rd to 25th December 2022) from the Met Office reads like a typical Christmas forecast for Britain:
Mild across the south for much of the period with rain at times but also some sunshine. Colder in the north with some snow possible, mainly for Scottish hills.
British people (and non-British people living here) often complain about our weather. Although it is frequently unsettled it rarely reaches true extremes. This may mean we don’t have much snow at Christmas but it also means we escape the bitterly cold temperatures that affect other countries at the same latitude as us on Earth.
In Edmonton, Canada it is a dangerously cold -34°C at the time of writing. This city of about one million people is as far north as Manchester in England. Edmonton was named after the London suburb where it is currently a mild 8°C. Which one would you prefer?
I wish my readers a blessed and peaceful Christmas. Thank you for reading my work this year and we will talk in 2023.