Christmas weather forecast: Snow could hit parts of UK on Christmas Day

Festive weekend is forecast to be ‘unsettled’

Snow could hit parts of the UK on Christmas Day, forecasters have said as they issued an ice warning for Scotland ahead of the weekend.

Downpours are forecast across the UK over the next few days, with Met Office saying there is a chance this could turn into snow on Christmas Day in northeastern areas of England and Scotland.

And in parts of Scotland, Met Office said snow could arrive even earlier – on Wednesday and Thursday on high ground.

Parts of the country have been issued with a yellow ice warning over the next two days, due to “freezing rain” that may fall.

Met Office forecasters said areas of Scotland covered by the warning – including just south of Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as much of the Highlands – faced a greater chance of injuries and accidents due to slippery surfaces, as well as potential travel cancellations and delays caused by the weather.

The ice warning runs from Wednesday afternoon until the early hours of Thursday.

Rain is expected to fall “at times” across the UK in the run-up to the festive weekend. And on Christmas Day, the country is looking at “more unsettled conditions”, forecaster Nicky Maxey from the Met Office told The Independent.

This included rain across Wales, as well as central and southern England, she said.

“As that rain and milder air pushes further north, where it meets the cold air, you get a boundary layer and that is where we may see some snow,” she said, adding this would primarily be over higher ground.

“There is still some uncertainty over where that boundary will settle, but it looks at the moment any snow we are likely to see would be over high ground in Scotland – but also potentially over the far north of England.

“The Pennines, that sort of area, you might see a little bit of snow on Christmas Day.”

The temperature is expected to hover between 8C and 11C in southern parts of England on 25 December, getting slightly colder in the Midlands and largely below 5C in Scotland.

Ms Maxey from the Met Office said the days after Christmas are also expected to see unsettled weather.

The Met Office says the last widespread “white Christmas” in the UK was more than a decade ago, in 2010, when there was snow on the ground of 83 per cent of weather stations - the highest ever recorded.

While some snow fell on Christmas Day last year, the forecaster said it was not detected in many weather stations.