❄ Southampton Snow Probability Tracker
What 170 years of Southampton's own weather record says about the odds of a proper cold snap • Last checked: 00:39 on Thursday 29 October 2026
Southampton doesn't really do snow anymore - and, as it turns out, its own weather record can prove it. This page digs into the same 1855-to-date archive behind Monthly Historical Weather Data to rank every winter on record by how genuinely cold it was, sits that alongside the handful of winters everyone still talks about (1947, and the legendary Big Freeze of 1962-63), and lays out what the Met Office's own figures say about where UK snow is heading. Southampton's station doesn't actually log snow days itself - more on that below - so think of this as a cold-snap tracker with a snow history section bolted on, not a live snow gauge. But we're still keeping an eye on all the possibilities. 🐶
1. Southampton's own cold-winters record
Southampton's station doesn't record snow, but it does record Air Frost days every month back to 1855 - days the temperature dropped below freezing. Add up December, January and February for each winter and you get a genuine, apples-to-apples "how cold was this winter" score, computed fresh from the real archive every time this page loads (only winters with a complete Dec-Jan-Feb record count, so a missing month can never quietly understate a winter).
All-time winter average
26.5
air frost days (Dec+Jan+Feb), across 167 complete winters
Most recent complete winter (2025/26)
18
-8.5 days milder than average
| Rank | Winter | Dec | Jan | Feb | Total air frost days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 1962/63 ❄ see “The Great Snows” below | 16 | 29 | 21 | 66 |
| #2 | 1890/91 | 26 | 19 | 16 | 61 |
| #3 | 1879/80 | 24 | 23 | 8 | 55 |
| #4 | 1946/47 ❄ see “The Great Snows” below | 13 | 17 | 22 | 52 |
| #5 | 1894/95 | 5 | 21 | 25 | 51 |
| #6 | 1878/79 | 20 | 23 | 7 | 50 |
| #7 | 1887/88 | 14 | 17 | 18 | 49 |
| #8 | 1933/34 | 18 | 14 | 17 | 49 |
| #9 | 1941/42 | 7 | 18 | 24 | 49 |
| #10 | 2009/10 | 19 | 20 | 9 | 48 |
Top 10 coldest complete winters on Southampton's own 170-year record, ranked by total air frost days. For context: winter 1946/47 ranks #4 and 1962/63 ranks #1 out of all 167 complete winters on record - which is exactly what you'd expect from two winters everyone still talks about eighty years later.
Average winter cold (air frost days), by decade
Early decades (1850s-1870s) may only have one or two qualifying winters, so treat those bars as indicative rather than a stable average. From the mid-20th century on, the downward trend is unmistakable.
2. The Great Snows
Southampton's own station never logged snow directly, but these are the winters that made it into the history books - researched and sourced independently of the archive above, since it simply doesn't contain this information.
Winter 1946-47
The snowiest UK winter of the 20th century. Snow fell somewhere in the country every day for 55 days straight between January and March, first reaching southern England on 23 January. February 1947 was one of the coldest and darkest on record in the south - Kew Observatory saw no sun at all on 22 of the month's 28 days, and mean temperatures ran nearly 5°C below average across southern England. On Southampton's own record (above), this winter totalled 52 air frost days.
Source: Met Office - Severe Winters
Winter 1962-63 — “The Big Freeze”
Colder than 1947, and the coldest UK winter since 1740. Southampton had snow on the ground continuously from Boxing Day 1962 until 5 March 1963 - over two months without a thaw. Hampshire was hit hard: roads at Petersfield were buried under 15ft drifts, and parts of the Isle of Wight were cut off for weeks. Pack ice formed on the Solent itself. On Southampton's own record, this is the single coldest winter measured, at 66 air frost days.
Sources: Met Office • Central Southern England Weather Eye
December 2010
The UK's coldest December in the Met Office's national record (which starts in 1910), and the second-coldest in the much longer Central England Temperature series, which goes back to 1659 - missing the all-time record (set in 1890) by just 0.1°C. Snow showers in the first days of the month brought up to 25cm to parts of south-east England.
December 2022
The most recent widely-felt cold snap across southern England: a prolonged spell of low temperatures from 8-18 December brought snow across large parts of the country, with over 20cm falling in parts of southern England and the Midlands on 11 December alone - travel disruption, power cuts and school closures followed nationwide.
3. The bigger picture
The Met Office's own long-term averages back up what Southampton's own decade-by-decade chart above already shows. Nationally, the UK averages 13.0 days of snow lying on the ground per year (1991-2020 average) - but that figure is pulled up hard by Scotland and the uplands; the coastal south has always seen far less, and southern England's already-thin share of that total keeps shrinking. The number of UK "icing days" a year (days that never climb above freezing even at their warmest) has fallen from a long-term average of around 5 to well under 1 across much of the country in recent years. Met Office climate projections suggest that by the 2040s much of southern England may see very few sub-zero days at all, with lying snow potentially all but disappearing except on high ground by the end of the century.
None of which means it can't happen - 1962-63 arrived after a run of unremarkable winters too. So this page will keep watching Southampton's own numbers, winter after winter, just in case. ❄️
About this data
Southampton's own station archive does not record snow. Like almost every UK station's public record, it tracks Air Frost days (sub-zero temperature), not snowfall or snow depth - so section 1 above uses air frost days as an honest, real, computed proxy for "how cold was this winter", not a snow measurement. Section 2's historic snow events are researched separately and cited to their own sources, not derived from the archive. Section 3's climate figures are the Met Office's own published UK averages, not Southampton-specific (no station near Southampton publishes a local snow-days average) but the best publicly available reference point.
See Monthly Historical Weather Data for the full raw monthly archive this page's live figures are computed from.
See also: Monthly Historical Weather Data • Dog Walking Weather Advisory • 5 Day Forecast