COULD IT SNOW FOR CHRISTMAS?
Santas brave weather for seafront run
WITH just over a week to go until the big day, some people are starting to ask: will it snow this Christmas?
With a weather warning out for freezing rain this weekend, bookmakers have already started making predictions on whether snow will fall this festive season.
The Met Office says it can only predict weather with a reasonable amount of detail for a five to sevenday window.
That means weather predictions for Christmas Day won’t really be known until at least December 18.
A spokesman for the Met Office said the longer term forecast was complicated by Storm Deirdre, the weather system that has led to freezing rain this weekend. At the moment, there is effectively a battle going on between Storm Deirdre and areas of high pressure to the east and south. How this battle plays out will determine our festive weather.
At the moment, the UK outlook for Christmas week suggests it will be unsettled.
Bookmakers have already begun offering the latest odds on snowfall in a number of cities across Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland.
The odds suggest the chances of a white Christmas are higher for Scottish cities, but they don’t seem to rate the chances of Cardiff getting much snow.
Latest odds from William Hill, issued on Friday, suggest a 6-1 chance of snow in Cardiff on Christmas Day.
In the past 51 years, widespread snow, where more than 40% of stations record snow on the ground at 9am on December 25, has only happened four times.
The last time the UK had snow on Christmas Day was in 2015, with 10% of weather stations recording snowfall. Even then, none of the white stuff settled on the ground.
For the last significant white Christmas, you have to go back to 2010. That year, 83% of stations recorded snow on the ground, the highest amount ever reported.
This weekend, most of the freezing rain that has brought problems to some parts of the UK has now passed.
Today, early fog patches could be slow to clear.
It will be mostly dry with sunny spells before a band of showery rain arrives from the southwest through the afternoon.