THE WHITE CHRISTMAS INDEX

At Nestpick, we make it our business to know what attracts people to certain cities around the globe, and weather almost certainly always comes into the equation. However, the climate is undoubtedly changing around the world, and even our team in Berlin has noticed the local impact as we haven’t witnessed a White Christmas in years. This prompted a question - are the snowy Decembers of our childhood a thing of the past, and if someone wanted a higher chance of a white Christmas in the future, which city should they be looking to live in?

Climate change prediction is an incredibly complicated science, so keeping this in mind, we set out to find a simple methodology that could help us compare December snowfall from the last decade, and see if it would also be possible to predict the likelihood of cities having the right atmospheric conditions for a white Christmas in the future. To begin, we selected a list of 40 cities in the Northern Hemisphere which are among the top winter tourist destinations with travellers. Then, we utilised local weather stations in each city to calculate the average number of December days with snowfall between 2008 - 2018, to see from a glance if the amount of snowfall really had changed in recent years.

We then based our predictions of potential snowfall in December 2050 off a climate change research paper from Jean-Francois Bastin, an ecologist at the University of Ghent. His study shows how 77% of future cities are very likely to experience a climate that is closer to that of another existing city than to their own current climate. Most notably by 2050, Stockholm’s climate will resemble Budapest, London to Barcelona, and Seattle to San Francisco. Using these predicted ‘city pairings’ we were then able to create a very rudimentary prediction of snowfall in 2050 by using climate data from the last decade. While our methodology is very simplistic, the results highlight a clear trend towards warmer climates in the Northern Hemisphere, which means that white Christmases are very likely to become a thing of the past.

“For those who remember clearly the excitement of snow leading up to Christmas, it feels that Decembers just aren’t as snowy as they used to be,” commented Omer Kucukdere at Nestpick. “While we’re not suggesting that our study is by any means an exhaustive analysis into future weather patterns or scientific climate predication, our simple approach still reveals an overall trend for warmer Decembers in the Northern Hemisphere. For future generations, this means that White Christmases may become something that exists only in Hollywood films and old photos. It’s hard to deny that our climate is changing when even our team can see it from the snow days of their childhood to now. We know that putting this small study out there might not make much of a difference, but anything we can do to make people think about this issue is important.”

The full table of results in alphabetical order (by country) and the methodology can be found below. Each column is filterable from highest to lowest.