Met Office Weather Christmas
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00:00Common themes through next week, westerlies to begin things with low
00:05pressure to the north, higher pressure to the south. Then around Wednesday time
00:09low pressure developing more widely across the UK, spells of wet and windy
00:13weather for many, very mild as that happens as well. Then by the weekend
00:19after, higher pressure starting to return again from the south. Too early for
00:24specifics but those are the general trends. After that, and now we're talking
00:30about the week of Christmas, there are some weather patterns that are starting
00:36to appear in the computer model output that give a sense, a small flavour of
00:40what we might expect for the week of Christmas. One commonly occurring theme
00:47is for higher pressure to the south, lower pressure towards Iceland and this
00:51strong westerly airflow, a bit like how I described the weather for next Monday.
00:54So westerlies, mild, these are the temperature anomalies so a degree or two
00:59above average, spells of rain especially towards the northwest. That high
01:03pressure is key. Where that ends up for that Christmas week is crucial in
01:10determining exactly what kind of weather we'll get through that week because that
01:14higher pressure is the common theme in most of the computer model projections.
01:19In this one it's more firmly across the south of the UK, again mild, but the
01:23unsettled weather more towards the far northwest, many places more settled.
01:29And in this one it's more towards the southwest and it's a bit colder with these
01:33northwesterly winds. Now the GFS run that I mentioned that came out on Monday that
01:39had snowfall, that was mostly a more amplified, more extreme version of this
01:44with the higher pressure further north and more of a northerly wind. And that is
01:50a possibility but at the moment it's not looking like the most likely option.
01:55This sums up all of that model variability for the week of Christmas, 23rd of
02:01December through to the 30th of December and this shows the average pressure
02:07anomaly from all the different computer models for that week and it shows quite
02:10strongly a signal for higher pressure out there to the southwest of the UK.
02:15That would lead to westerlies or northwesterlies. So unsettled, the more
02:21unsettled weather in the northwest, drier towards the south and southwest and
02:25mostly relatively mild. Now that's from the most recent set of model runs. This
02:33is from the set of model runs from a day before and the day before that and they
02:38all show roughly the same thing although 24 hours earlier the high was a bit more
02:43amplified and that would lead to perhaps a colder feel northwesterlies or
02:49northerlies and the temperature anomaly for the corresponding weeks is sitting
02:56below each of those. The most recent models show reds across the UK and would
03:02suggest, I'm just going to skip back to that, would suggest milder than average but 24
03:08hours earlier had closer to average. So basically this is from the Met Office
03:15extended model as well, MoGreps, and this shows an average higher pressure
03:20anomaly to the southwest of the UK. So there's this broad agreement for that week of
03:24Christmas at the moment for higher pressure somewhere to the west or
03:30southwest of the UK, mostly a westerly Atlantic influence for the UK itself, more
03:36unsettled towards the north, more settled towards the south. Certainly no signs of
03:42a strong signal for a white Christmas but nothing could be ruled out right at
03:47this stage and it would be foolish to take one computer model run and go with
03:52that as we all know, I'm sure. And so yeah, if you see headlines like this I would
04:01strongly encourage you to ignore them and head to the Met Office YouTube
04:04channel. We'll be keeping a close eye on things as they evolve in the run-up to
04:08Christmas. We'll keep you updated right here. We've got the 10-day trend. Tomorrow of
04:12course we've got our 14-day outlook that we put on our app. All of that involves a
04:17look at the very latest information and we'll be updating things as and when
04:21we've got more and more new information. But thanks for joining me this week,
04:25that's all I've got for you.