Historical outlook · Christmas 2026
Will it snow where you are?
Discover the odds for 43,686 UK towns and villages, powered by our 1 km snow model and 34 years of British winter.
Find your local forecast
until Christmas Day
Forecast sharpens daily
National outlook
The Christmas snow map
11%
Chance of a widely white Christmas
National ranking
Snowiest places this Christmas
Around the country
Explore by region
Scotland
8% at one spot · snowiest Banchory at 16%
North East England
7% at one spot · snowiest Stanley at 12%
Yorkshire and the Humber
5% at one spot · snowiest Queensbury at 11%
East Midlands
5% at one spot · snowiest Hucknall at 9%
West Midlands
5% at one spot · snowiest Kidsgrove at 11%
East of England
3% at one spot · snowiest Norwich at 8%
North West England
5% at one spot · snowiest Oldham at 9%
Wales
3% at one spot · snowiest Brymbo at 8%
Northern Ireland
5% at one spot · snowiest Omagh at 8%
South East England
3% at one spot · snowiest Amesbury at 7%
London
2% at one spot · snowiest Hitchin at 8%
South West England
2% at one spot · snowiest Mendip at 6%
Method summary
What's behind the number
A 1 km observational climatology, a wet-bulb phase diagnostic, three global forecast ensembles and a North Atlantic Oscillation layer, calibrated together and scored on held-out Christmases.
1.29M
cell-Christmases analysed
37,995
1 km grid cells
122
live ensemble members
34
winters of record
Two different questions. Town, village and postcode pages answer “does it snow here?”. Area pages can't use that number — an average sits below every place inside it — and “does it snow somewhere?” is no better, since that rises the more finely you grid the country. So national and regional headlines give the odds of a widely white Christmas: falling snow reaching at least a tenth of the area's towns. Both figures are built from the same calibrated probabilities, so they stay on one scale.
HadUK-Grid 1 km observations
Met Office daily temperature and rainfall, 1991 to 2024, on a 1 km grid: 37,995 cells across 34 winters, or 1,291,830 cell-Christmases. Each of the 43,686 towns, villages and postcode districts resolves to its own cell, so elevation differences over a few kilometres are retained.
Precipitation-phase diagnosis
Rain and snow are separated by wet-bulb temperature, computed with the Stull approximation and combined with a published precipitation-phase relationship. A day counts as white if snow fell on 24 or 25 December.
Rolling-origin calibration
The probability scale is corrected against three rolling five-Christmas windows. The calibration is monotonic in log-odds, so the 1 km spatial ordering is preserved. Each place also carries a beta-binomial posterior interval.
Multi-model ensemble
Within 30 days, about 122 members from ICON, GFS and ECMWF IFS are pooled. Each model's native full-column snowfall field is blended 50/50 with our surface diagnostic, then combined with the climatology in log-odds space on a lead-time ramp capped at 0.5.
Sub-seasonal NAO layer
Between 12 and 27 days out, the national baseline is shifted by the North Atlantic Oscillation, read as a seven-day mean of the NOAA daily index. The coefficient is held at -0.25 log-odds per NAO unit; fitting it freely across 38,000 spatially correlated cells overstates the sample, which is 34 Christmases.
Forward-chained validation
Each Christmas is scored with the model rebuilt from prior years only. Brier score and log loss are reported together, over windows including 2009 and 2010, since a window without snow in it favours any forecast that lowers its probabilities.
Current scorecard. Over nineteen forward-chained Christmases from 2006, the daily-index NAO layer reduced log loss by 6.1% against no NAO layer, against 2.0% for the monthly index it replaced. Promotion required beating both on Brier and log loss across two test windows. See the full scorecard.
Forecasting is never certain, and long-range figures are guidance rather than a guarantee. For entertainment and general interest. This is not an official Met Office forecast.
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