Will it snow this Christmas? This is a question many people will be posing as we approach the big day and the rest of the festive season.

At the time of compiling the forecast, and after analysing projected air pressure maps covering the North Atlantic and Northwest Europe, I am confident that Hampshire and the Isle of Wight will be snow-free on Christmas Day itself.

Britain’s national weather service, the Met Office’s classification of a white Christmas is when a single snowflake falls anywhere in the UK.

And I don’t anticipate this happening in our neck of the woods. However, that is not to say that the white stuff will elude us completely this winter.

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Back to the here and now, I think we should all expect generally mild or very mild weather at times until the tail end of December, thereafter it may be a different story. The reasons behind this likely scenario is a large anticyclone over the Atlantic is set to persist, and with low pressure and bitterly cold conditions sat over Scandinavia, this will force mild air over the Azores region up across the Central South England district which includes our patch.

Putting more details on what means for us, we should expect a fair amount of dry weather with variable cloud cover along with brighter slots on some days combined with wetter periods as weather front slide over the top of the Atlantic high I mentioned earlier, and down across the British Isles.

Perhaps cold enough on some nights for a touch of frost after dry days.
Mist and fog patches are possible on some nights.

Readers can follow my regularly updated daily and weekly forecasts on X (formerly Twitter). My X site account handle is @HIOWweather.