What comes after the coldest Christmas in 15 years?

If this was ever normal, the truth is that, today, December 25, 2025, it has been something completely exceptional: we not only talk the coldest day of 2025we’re talking about the coldest Christmas in more than 15 years; We are talking about snow levels at 500 meters and thermometers at -6ºC in half of Spain. Although the warnings have been limitedare big words.

What has really happened? Something very simple, really: a combination of polar air and precipitation in the east. It is the result of atmospheric blocking to the north with the consequent diversion of cold air masses towards our latitudes (and the successive arrivals of storms from the west also linked to that blockage).

Be that as it may, the result is the same: a few icy days, with frost in the interior and in the mountains, snow at low levels and problems on around thirty roads.

And, of course, as usually happens, while we focus on the ‘snow’, the real risk is on the ice. The sum of night frosts and humidity generates invisible plaques on secondary roads and mountain passes. That in a period of very high mobility (like Christmas) is a ticking time bomb.

The underlying question, however, is another.. We already know that a day at -6 degrees is not enough for us to talk about a cold wave. And yet, the social sensation is clear: in a climate framework that tends to make this increasingly rare, a cold episode of this type is beginning to be very striking.

But what will come next? The answer, depending on available modelsis that the cold “loses its bite”; but the minimum temperatures will remain low so the risk of frost will not decrease. For its part, during the weekend, instability will last a little longer in the Mediterranean and the Andalusian Atlantic coast.

Then New Year’s Eve will comeanother of those “big days” in mobility. There we also expect colder than normal in almost all of Spain (except in the Canary Islands). However, no heavy rain is expected.

January is still too far away to know what will happen for sure.

Something we are not used to. We must not forget that Christmas 2023 It was very mild; we spent 2022 almost in short sleeve with “values ​​within the 95% percentile: that is, temperatures could occur in the range of the 5% of highest temperatures recorded for the date.” And what 2021 was closed with temperatures up to 25 degrees in places like Bilbao airport.

The normal thing, lately, is an increasingly warm December in a context of increasingly warmer years. So we better enjoy it, it doesn’t seem like this cold is going to be common in the coming years.

Image | ECMWF

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