Is a polar vortex coming for the UK this winter? What the forecasts say

What is being shared

“UK weather: Britons advised to stockpile food and brace for polar vortex this winter” ran on GB News on 5 October 2026 (Marcus Donaldson, 09:53). The article says a polar vortex is “set to batter the nation this winter”, that Arctic winds driven by a strengthening El Niño are expected to hit the UK, and that “A disrupted polar vortex, weakened by El Niño, will trap freezing winds in the Arctic and channel them towards Europe and North America.”

It then credits British Gas with advice to stockpile at least three days of food and essentials, make a household contact plan, check on elderly or vulnerable neighbours, keep pets indoors, carry a car kit, seal gaps round windows and doors, insulate exposed pipes and check the roof and gutters. It names no source for any of the vortex sentences, gives no British Gas spokesperson, release or date, and contains no link to British Gas’s website.

It is the latest in a run, logged in full at the foot of this page. The most repeated version began on 1 October, when the Mirror and then the Daily Express paired a Met Office “polar vortex verdict” with ‘Beast from the East’ snow. The first headline to name British Gas alongside the vortex was the Express’s “British Gas says stockpile ‘three days of food’ before Polar Vortex snow” (Alex Evans, 3 October). Yorkshire Live, the Evening Standard, the Daily Star and GB News repeated its list; Metro’s version on 4 October, about Londoners and a ‘Godzilla’ El Niño, gave no source at all for its three days.

The stockpiling angle itself is older, as the section on British Gas below sets out. The Daily Star had also run a ‘Godzilla El Niño’ polar-vortex headline on the night of 4 October, and the Birmingham Mail on 5 October put snow flurries in the diary from Monday 12 October.

Not all of it is alarmed. The Independent’s explainer of 5 October (Nicole Wootton-Cane) says experts think it is too soon to tell whether a weakened vortex will send Arctic air south this autumn and winter, and the Mirror’s 5 October piece (Zahra Khaliq), under a headline about a “Met Office polar vortex verdict”, reports in its body that, according to the Met Office, a polar-vortex cold snap or snow remains unlikely this autumn. The Met Office’s own weather headline review, published on 5 October, took as its first example a headline almost identical to the Daily Star’s of 4 October; it named no outlet.

Three separate things have been welded together: one real sentence from a Met Office blog of 23 September about the stratospheric polar vortex possibly weakening late in the winter; the Met Office’s 22 September statement that this El Niño is the strongest in the observational record, which we cover on our El Niño page and tracker; and an undated British Gas web page about preparing for heavy snow. None of them is a forecast of a cold snap.

The Met Office sentence is usually quoted accurately, but it describes a possibility late in the winter, not something on its way now, and GB News’s own account of how the vortex works has it the wrong way round. This page takes each in turn and, like our ‘snow bomb’ page, it is a standing page: each polar-vortex headline is logged at the foot against what happened.

What the polar vortex is, and what a sudden stratospheric warming is

The stratospheric polar vortex is a band of westerly winds that circles the Arctic in the stratosphere, between about 10 and 50 kilometres up. It is seasonal: NOAA says its winds typically form by late August or early September, and a 2017 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Waugh, Sobel and Polvani) describes it forming in autumn and disappearing each spring.

There is also a separate, larger vortex in the lower atmosphere that exists all year round. The same paper says cold-air outbreaks are most directly linked to brief, local bulges in the edge of that lower vortex, which may sometimes be related to the stratospheric vortex, but that there is no known one-to-one connection between the two. NOAA’s polar vortex blog opened in December 2023 by saying the term is not a synonym for a cold snap. NOAA also notes that the vortex does not usually vary strongly in September and October, so at this time of year it does not usually affect the circulation below it.

A sudden stratospheric warming, or SSW, is what happens when the vortex breaks down in winter. The Met Office describes a rapid warming of the stratosphere, by up to about 50°C in a couple of days, as the westerly winds round the pole weaken or reverse to easterly. The standard test is the average west-to-east wind at 60° north and 10 hectopascals, about 30 kilometres up, turning easterly. Major mid-winter events happen about six times a decade (Charlton and Polvani, 2007), or, as NOAA puts it, every other year or so; they are most common in January and February, and NOAA notes only one major event in November since 1958.

The effect, when there is one, comes later and at ground level. The Met Office says the effects of an SSW take anything from a few days to a few weeks to work down to the surface, and that individual events can be reliably predicted only about a week or two ahead; NOAA says the details are often not predictable beyond 7 to 10 days.

In the UK the result is often a switch to easterly winds and colder weather: the Met Office said in January 2021 that on average 70 per cent of occasions see that switch at ground level, and in November 2025 put it as “a cold snap follows more often than not”. Not always. The SSW of winter 2018–19 brought little impact on UK weather, the Met Office says, and the record-warm spell of February 2019 came after it. Its learn-about page names the cold, snowy spells of 2009–10, 2013 and 2018 as connected to SSWs, and adds that an SSW does not happen every year and does not always affect our weather when it does.

The bit GB News gets backwards

GB News says a disrupted vortex, weakened by El Niño, will trap freezing winds in the Arctic and channel them towards Europe. That sentence contradicts itself. NOAA’s explainer puts it simply: when the vortex is strong and stable, “The coldest polar air stays in the Arctic.” It is when the vortex weakens, shifts or splits that the jet stream becomes very wavy and polar air can sink into the mid-latitudes.

The Met Office’s guidance for contingency planners says the same for Britain: a stronger stratospheric vortex favours a strong jet stream and mild, wet UK weather, and a weakening vortex lets the jet weaken and meander, which raises the chance of colder outbreaks. The Evening Standard and the Independent both described the mechanism correctly, though the Standard went on to say the UK was likely to face extremely cold, windy and snowy conditions over the coming months, which the Met Office’s outlook does not support.

So a vortex that stays strong is not good news for Britain either; it is a different kind of news. Met Office and University of Leeds research published in March 2025 found that the strong vortex of February 2022 made intense storms up to three times more likely and raised the chance of three or more storms in a week by about 80 per cent.

The winter of 2015–16, during the last very strong El Niño, had what NOAA’s Amy Butler called an extraordinarily strong vortex from November to mid-January; it was the mildest winter for England and Wales in records from 1910 and the UK’s second-wettest. The early-winter El Niño risk, in other words, is wind and rain. That is the risk the Met Office’s outlook actually carries this year, and winter storm preparation is the page for it.

As for the claim that the vortex is set to hit Britain this winter: no official source says it. The Met Office’s 5 October review says there is “nothing in the forecast that indicates changes in the polar vortex”, and that any such change linked to El Niño would come at the end of the winter, if at all. It describes shifts in probability rather than guarantees, and says the current forecast does not support the idea that the UK is about to be hit by widespread snow linked to the vortex.

Does El Niño make it more likely?

A little, late in the season, and only in the odds. The sentence doing the rounds, that through the latter part of the winter, following a peak in El Niño, the stratospheric polar vortex can become weaker, is genuine: it is in the Met Office blog of 23 September 2026, “Does a hot summer mean a cold winter?”, which LBC and the Mirror attribute to a spokesperson and the Express to its latest weather blog. The same blog says El Niño alone does not determine precise weather patterns and that it is simply too early to say what winter 2026–27 will bring.

The Met Office’s standing guidance for planners is one line: “El Niño increases the risk of a windy and mild start and cold end to winter.” It lists other drivers alongside it, including the direction of the winds high over the equator (the quasi-biennial oscillation), whose easterly phase raises the chance of a weaker jet stream and an SSW.

The research behind that line is consistent and more modest than the headlines. In 53 years of reanalysis, SSWs were nearly twice as frequent in El Niño or La Niña winters as in neutral ones, and occurred with equal probability in El Niño and La Niña winters (Butler and Polvani, 2011). In a 2017 modelling study by Polvani and colleagues, El Niño raised the frequency of SSWs, by about 30 per cent in NOAA’s summary, while La Niña did not appear to change it, and the authors stress that most SSWs are not caused by the tropical Pacific at all.

NOAA’s own tally from the ERA5 reanalysis has 42 events: 17 in El Niño winters, 16 in La Niña and 9 in neutral. Those are event counts rather than per-winter rates, so treat them as approximate. El Niño is associated with a warmer, weaker vortex (Domeisen, Garfinkel and Butler, 2019), and Met Office scientists found a stratospheric route to a cold late winter in northern Europe in El Niño years, but in their experiments it operated only in years when an SSW occurred (Ineson and Scaife, 2009).

The “research paper published by the US government’s NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory” cited by the Evening Standard and the Daily Star is a 2016 guest post on NOAA’s ENSO blog by Amy Butler, not a new study. It says El Niño tends to promote the breakdown of the vortex, especially in late winter; that breakdowns happen roughly every other year and generally cannot be predicted more than 10 to 15 days ahead; that many headline cold-air outbreaks are largely unrelated to the stratospheric vortex; and that the very strong El Niño winter of 1997–98 had no major SSW at all.

The analogues are the honest part. In 2015–16, with NOAA’s Oceanic Niño Index peaking at +2.59°C, the vortex stayed extraordinarily strong until mid-January and its final breakdown did not come until 5 March 2016; England and Wales had their mildest winter in records from 1910.

In 2023–24, peak +1.99°C, NOAA says the vortex winds fully reversed twice, in mid-January and on 4 March 2024. On 8 January 2024 the Met Office said El Niño made a colder, drier second half of winter more likely, and Adam Scaife said the weakening vortex tallied with its forecasts for colder, drier conditions in the coming month. Mid-January did bring a cold spell with wintry hazards. Then February was the warmest on record for England and Wales, with southern England’s wettest February in a series from 1836, and the winter as a whole was provisionally the UK’s fifth-warmest.

And the 2018 “Beast from the East”, the example the headlines reach for, followed an SSW on 12 February 2018 in a winter that was a weak La Niña, not an El Niño; three days before it, the Met Office called the UK impact “still hugely uncertain”. A strong El Niño nudges the odds. It does not create the mechanism, and even a disrupted vortex does not guarantee a cold spell.

What the forecasts say, as of 5 October

Start with the document written for people who have to plan: the Met Office’s UK 3-Month Outlook for October to December 2026, issued on 28 September, with the next due on 26 October. Against a normal split of 20 per cent cold, 60 near average and 20 mild, it gives cold 15 per cent (0.8 times normal), near average 55 and mild 30 (1.5 times normal). For rain it gives wet 40 per cent, twice the normal chance; for wind, windy 25 per cent (1.3 times).

Its summary is double the normal chance of a wet period, mild more likely, windy more likely, and “a chance of impacts from cold weather later in the period”. Its question-and-answer section says prolonged or widespread cold spells are less likely than usual and that the risk of impacts such as widespread frost, ice or snowfall is reduced compared with normal. The polar vortex and the stratosphere are not mentioned once.

That also dates the figures in the GB News piece. Its line that the Met Office has warned a warm and wet autumn is about one-and-a-half to two times more likely than usual comes from the Met Office blog of 11 September, which was based on the previous outlook, for September to November. Its quotation from the Met Office’s Chief Meteorologist, Ian Lisk, is accurate, and it fairly paraphrases the rest of what he said: that El Niño is one of several factors, and that even a very strong event “does not automatically mean more severe impacts for the UK”, in the blog’s words. But those words are from the same 11 September blog, and the article does not say so.

The phrase “particularly from November” does not appear in any Met Office text we checked; the Met Office’s own phrasings are later this autumn and into early winter (11 September), the second half of the autumn (the outlook) and towards the end of October or early November, at low confidence (5 October).

As of 5 October, nothing in the Met Office’s forecasts points to widespread snow at low levels. Its week-ahead blog and headline review of 5 October have rain across much of England and parts of Wales on Wednesday 7 October, heaviest in parts of northern and especially eastern England, where some model runs give isolated spots more than 50mm; a possible rural frost into Thursday 8 October, with showers that could turn wintry over the highest Scottish mountains, which the Met Office says is not unusual for October; and the wettest weather from Saturday 10 to Monday 12 October in the north-west, with a chance of gales in the north.

Its long-range text, as it read on the evening of 5 October, has Saturday 10 to Monday 19 October changeable, with rain and strong winds at times, brief cooler interludes and temperatures a little above average overall, and Tuesday 20 October to Tuesday 3 November changeable with occasional colder interludes and temperatures near or a little above average. It does not mention snow, the polar vortex or El Niño. The review’s own summary: “Dramatic nationwide snow and prolonged freezing conditions are not the central themes of the current forecast.” That is the text the Birmingham Mail’s flurries from 12 October, and the Daily Star’s heavy snow in the coming weeks, have to be set against.

On 5 October the Met Office warnings page listed no weather warnings for 5 to 11 October, though it carried a notice that the list might be out of date, and no UKHSA cold-health alert was in force; the core cold-health alert season starts on 1 November.

And the vortex itself is behaving normally. Our own reading of NASA’s MERRA-2 and GEOS analyses, fetched on the evening of 5 October, puts the 60° north, 10 hectopascal wind at 16.3 metres per second against a 1991–2020 average of 15.6 for this week of the year: the 20th highest of 48 years for the date, in the middle of the pack and strengthening as it should in October. NOAA’s GFS analysis gives 15.9, its 16-day forecast 20.8 and the GEFS ensemble mean at ten days 18.7; NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center chart, updated on 4 October, shows the observed winds inside the normal band and no ensemble member reversing them before mid-October.

In the same NASA record, the wind never reversed to easterly on any day between 5 October and 30 November in 1979–2025; the lowest October value was 7.5 metres per second, on 10 October 2003, and the earliest winter reversal by calendar date was 4 December 1981. That is our calculation with a simple threshold, not a vetted catalogue, but it matches the Met Office’s line that nothing in the forecast points to a vortex change. We found no SSW forecast for winter 2026–27 from the Met Office, ECMWF or NOAA.

Two non-official commentaries exist and are context, not forecasts: Severe Weather Europe (16 September) reads seasonal model output as showing weakening from about early January and says the vortex is starting the season stronger than last year, and AER’s Judah Cohen (28 September) expected a stretched vortex over the following fortnight with normal to above-normal temperatures across most of Europe, including the UK, calling the winter forecast not straightforward.

El Niño itself is as strong as reported, and stronger than GB News says. GB News says it could be one of the strongest on record; the Met Office said on 22 September that it already is the strongest in the observational record, measured on central Pacific sea-surface temperatures, with the peak still to come. Its 23 September blog cites seasonal models predicting a peak in November or December, and its outlook says El Niño is likely to persist until at least early 2027.

NOAA’s three-month Oceanic Niño Index for July to September 2026 is +2.16°C, above the 2023–24 peak of +1.99 but still below the +2.59 of 2015–16, so the accurate phrasing is the Met Office’s, the strongest in the observational record, rather than ‘on every measure’. NOAA’s 10 September discussion gives more than a 90 per cent chance of a very strong event this autumn and winter, and a 75 per cent chance that October to December exceeds every event since 1950 on its relative index; its next discussion is due on 8 October. Our El Niño tracker follows NOAA’s numbers as they update.

Where the stockpiling advice comes from

We found no polar-vortex or El Niño warning from British Gas. The only source for every item in the GB News list is an undated, evergreen page on British Gas’s advice site, The Source, headed “How to prepare for heavy snowfall”. It is a ten-point checklist: insulation, gaps round windows and doors, pipes, heat sources, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, the stopcock, blankets and warm coats, the roof, gutters and overhanging branches, a car check, and looking after each other.

Point 8 reads: “It’s a good habit to have at least three days’ worth of food and essentials stored in an easy-to-reach part of your home,” listing medicines, drinking water, non-perishable food, extra blankets, a torch, batteries and a phone charger, plus a car kit. Point 9 says to keep the fuel tank half full in snowy conditions if you can. Point 10 covers a household contact plan, checking on elderly or vulnerable relatives and neighbours, keeping pets indoors when it turns particularly cold, and the fact that antifreeze is toxic to dogs and cats. The page does not contain the words polar vortex, El Niño or stockpile, and it ends with a promotion for British Gas’s HomeCare cover.

Nor is it new. The Internet Archive’s earliest capture of the page, from 16 May 2022, already contains the three days, the half-full tank and the antifreeze warning, and later captures we checked, up to 10 October 2025, do too. British Gas’s newsroom, as of 5 October, shows only a HomeCare winter promotion. The honest description is that the same advice has been on British Gas’s website since at least 2022, not that British Gas issued a warning in October 2026. We could not check British Gas’s social accounts or Centrica’s press office, so “none found” is as far as we can go.

The press had recycled the page before anyone mentioned a vortex: “British Gas urges households to stockpile 3 days of drinking water” (Daily Express, 4 January 2026) and “British Gas urges UK households to buy food for three days and sleeping bags” (Mirror, 4 April 2026). On 5 September the Express paired British Gas’s three days with the Environment Secretary Angela Eagle’s remarks on keeping some food at home, and added its own line that El Niño can bring colder winters as it displaces a polar vortex; PA’s report of her words gives no number of days and does not mention a vortex.

On 26 September the Express ran a list of “6 food items before Polar Vortex snow” from the US firm Direct Energy, with the vortex framing taken from USA Today. On 2 October it turned British Gas’s point 9 into “Drivers urged to keep tank ‘half full’ for Polar Vortex snow”. The 3 October Express piece was the first to name British Gas in a polar-vortex headline, and the British Gas versions since, including GB News, repeat its list. Metro, on 4 October, gave no source at all for its three days.

Where does “three days” come from in UK guidance? The British Red Cross suggests a three days’ supply of bottled water and long-life, ready-to-eat food, and Ready Scotland says three days’ supply of bottled water and food that does not need cooking. GOV.UK Prepare, the national campaign, uses no number: it talks about an emergency lasting a few days, and recommends at least 2.5 to 3 litres of drinking water per person per day, the World Health Organization’s survival figure, and about 10 litres a day once cooking and hygiene are included. We checked the claims that the government has told households to stockpile separately, and how much food to store sets out what a few days looks like for a real household.

What’s worth doing this autumn

The British Gas list is sensible. It is also the same in October as in a cold snap, and nothing on it needs buying in a hurry. A few days of water and food that needs no cooking is the official advice whatever the vortex does; the GOV.UK kit list, the £30 supermarket version and the kit builder, which sizes it to your household, are the place to start. A headline is no reason to go further: a cupboard filled in a hurry is money and shelf space wasted, and if you do want more headroom, how much food to store explains how to build it up gradually.

The cheap, seasonal jobs are the ones that pay off in a real cold spell. Know where your stopcock is and how to prevent and thaw a frozen pipe; if the boiler stops on a frosty morning, a frozen condensate pipe is the usual cause, and boiler not working covers the rest. Do the draught-proofing now, while it is mild; keeping warm without the heating covers the simple fixes. If you will use a plug-in heater or a stove, read electric heater safety and log burners and carbon monoxide first, and know the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. For the car: driving in snow and ice, the car kit builder and the law on defrosting. British Gas’s half-a-tank habit is a reasonable winter one.

Because the outlook points to wind and rain before it points to cold, the likelier disruption this side of Christmas is a storm and a power cut. Winter storm preparation and power cut preparation cover it; power cuts this winter sets out what the system operator expects; and anyone who relies on powered medical equipment, or who would struggle in a cut, should join the free Priority Services Register now. Storm damage: who pays is for afterwards.

Then the people part, which British Gas gets right. Agree a household plan and who checks on whom; the older relative kit and pet kit builders size the extras, and the antifreeze warning is real: keep it, and any spills, away from dogs and cats. If a cold spell does come, Cold Weather Payments in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are triggered by the thermometer, not the headlines, and the checker says whether your postcode and benefits qualify; Scotland has a different, flat-rate payment, explained in the same guide.

What not to do: don’t shop on a vortex headline, don’t rush to fill the car because a map turned purple, and don’t ignore a real Met Office warning in November because the October headlines were hype. The ‘snow bomb’ page explains how the maps behind the dates are made.

How we’ll know if a cold spell is really coming

There is a sequence, and it is public. First, the stratosphere: the Met Office says it can reliably predict an individual SSW about a week or two ahead, and has written about it on its blog when one was expected or under way, as in January 2021 and February 2023; NOAA’s polar vortex blog and Climate Prediction Center chart show the same wind. That is the moment the phrase “sudden stratospheric warming” becomes news rather than a search term; even then, the effect takes days to weeks to reach the ground and arrives more often than not, not always.

Second, the outlook. The Met Office’s next UK 3-Month Outlook, for November to January, is due on 26 October; its 5 October review says any El Niño-linked vortex change would come at the end of winter, if at all, so an outlook that raised the cold odds for January or later would be consistent with everything above, not a reversal of it. NOAA’s next ENSO discussion is due on 8 October. We will record both here.

Third, the warnings, which are the only things that should change your plans. Met Office National Severe Weather Warnings for snow and ice are issued up to seven days ahead and appear on our weather warnings tracker; UKHSA Cold-Health Alerts for England, whose core season runs from 1 November to 31 March, appear on the health alerts tracker, with the levels explained in our guide. If lines come down instead, the power cuts tracker and storm names are live.

What we will not treat as a signal: a model map with a date on it, a headline with “verdict” in it, or a commercial blog’s reading of a seasonal model. We will keep reading the NASA and NOAA stratospheric data and say here, with the date, when the vortex does something unusual.

Polar-vortex headlines vs what happened

18 August 2026. “UK snow weather latest as polar vortex change risks freezing cold snap”, one of the headlines the Met Office reviewed that day, without naming the outlet. Its verdict: temperatures close to average, then more likely around or a little above average into September, with no widespread wintry conditions indicated; logged on our ‘snow bomb’ page. Outcome: no cold snap. The Met Office reported on 1 October that September 2026 was warmer than average in every UK region.

1 October 2026. “Met Office issues polar vortex verdict as UK faces ‘Beast from the East’ snow” (Daily Express) and “UK faces ‘Beast from the East’ snow system after Met Office polar vortex verdict” (Mirror). What the Met Office had actually said: the 23 September blog sentence that the vortex can weaken late in winter after an El Niño peak, and its November 2025 line that a cold snap follows an SSW more often than not. No SSW had occurred or been forecast. Outcome: open; the vortex was near normal on 5 October.

3 October 2026. “British Gas says stockpile ‘three days of food’ before Polar Vortex snow” (Daily Express). Its British Gas list was repeated by Yorkshire Live, the Evening Standard, the Daily Star and GB News. The British Gas page is undated and has carried the same advice since at least May 2022; we found no British Gas statement on the vortex.

4 October 2026. “Godzilla El Niño to smash Brits with polar vortex of snow and storms in dire warning” (Daily Star). The Met Office’s 5 October review, taking a near-identical headline as its first example, said the current forecast does not support the UK being “smashed” by widespread snow associated with changes to the polar vortex.

5 October 2026. “UK weather: Britons advised to stockpile food and brace for polar vortex this winter” (GB News); “Brits need to stockpile three days of food as polar vortex set to batter UK” (Daily Star), with heavy snow in the coming weeks; “UK faces -2C snow next week as Met Office and BBC Weather issue update” (Birmingham Mail), with flurries from 12 October, concentrated in Scotland. The Met Office long-range text for 10 to 19 October: changeable, rain and strong winds at times, temperatures a little above average. Outcome: to be recorded after 12 October.