A website which aims to predict whether any location on earth will get a White Christmas has been launched.
The simple site allows you to type in a destination name and it then provides a percentage likelihood of snow on Christmas Day.
Most locations in the UK seem to currently get 25% regardless of whether they’re in Scotland or southern England.
Ski resort names can be entered with some like Les Arcs, Morzine and St Moritz seeming to break the machine. However for those that did work, such as Davos, Garmisch Partenkirchen, Whistler and Vail, the score tended to be 50% Even Niseko in Japan, one of the world’s snowiest resorts, scored 50%
In fact, although long range forecasting is becoming (slightly) more reliable, the Met Office say that you still can’t really tell what the weather will be like with much certainty more than five days ahead.
It is also not quite clear what constitutes a ‘White Christmas’ – particularly in the UK. For bookies (who are currently giving 4-1 on there being one in London), it apparently means at least one snowflake actually falling on Christmas Day – regardless of whether snow is actually lying from falls earlier in December or not. For many people though it means looking outside and seeing everything covered in snow.
That hasn’t really happened since 2009 in most of the UK with last winter seeing the least snowfall since records began more than 60 years ago. Climate change has brought higher average temperatures over land and sea and this has generally reduced the chances of a white Christmas, the Met Office says.
A Met Office spokesman said: “We can accurately forecast if snow is likely on any given Christmas Day up to five days beforehand. In terms of the statistical likelihood of snow based on climatology, we know that a snowflake has fallen somewhere in the UK on Christmas Day 38 times in the last 54 years, so we can probably expect more than half of all Christmas Days to be a ‘white Christmas’. However the Dickensian scene of widespread snow lying on the ground on Christmas Day is much rarer. There has only been a widespread covering of snow on the ground, where more than 40 per cent of stations in the UK reported snow on the ground at 9am, four times in the last 51 years.”