With just over a week to go to Christmas Day we are being asked whether the cold weather will return to give us a white Christmas.

Unfortunately it’s still a little too early to say exactly what the weather will bring to the UK on the big day, but it does look as though the early predictions quoted in the press of snow falling in many places on Christmas Day and more recent white Christmas is “a dead cert” could end up being somewhat wide of the mark.

The current Met Office UK Outlook for Sunday 23 Dec 2012 to Tuesday 1 Jan 2013 suggests that the unsettled conditions we have at the moment are expected to continue until the New Year:

“The rather changeable weather is likely to persist into the beginning of January with low pressure expected to be dominant near the British Isles. The north of the UK is most likely to see colder than average conditions, with relatively typical amounts of rainfall. During the same period, temperatures over the south are likely to be closer to average whilst rainfall amounts may be a little above average. Uncertainty then increases significantly into the final week of the period, with no clear weather type favoured, perhaps indicating less unsettled conditions.”

Of course we will continue to update the forecast as Christmas approaches, with the first forecast for the day itself published on our website later this week.

So if you are in search of a white Christmas signs are that many of us may be a little disappointed again this year, but you can find out more about white Christmases in the UK in the following video: