Differing weather forecasts for Christmas

Unusually for me I'm planning to be away from home, visiting Dorset in fact, over the Christmas period. One of those rare occasions I forsake my two counties! So what sort of weather will occur over the festive season? In the blue corner we have genial John Hammond on the BBC Weather website here making his predictions for the whole of December. For the second half of the month it's a case of "More settled conditions develop" according to John. Now it has to be said that a fortnight is a very long time in terms of UK weather so that it would be possible to have a big storm over say three days of the holiday period with the rest of the period dominated by anticyclonic weather. If that happened he could possibly claim success looking at the two weeks as a whole. In other words a long range forecast from the Met Office can be what you decide to make it!

In the red corner we have Piers Corbyn and his company 'Weatheraction'. Piers puts his neck on the line with his very specific forecast as to when severe weather events will occur. See here for his ideas about December (incidentally you can see why I say "In the red corner", his pages on the internet just scream at you although some of them are far worse than this - it puts my back up!). He is quite correct about the stormy weather we are enduring this weekend; however I don't know whether that was in his long range forecast from many months ago or just in his update at the start of December. I'm more interested in his anticipations for the 23rd to the 26th. All being well I shall return home on the 27th of the month by which time I shall be able to make a judgement on the accuracy of his prophecy.

I have been critical of Piers Corbyn in the past (scroll down the right hand side of this blog page and click on his name to read everything I've written about him so far) so this Christmas will be a chance for him to redeem himself.