How many snowmen can you make from Storm Goretti?

Enough snow has fallen on the UK over the past 24 hours for three snowmen for every person in the country. Or perhaps more than three.

There. It has been said. It is entirely unprovable but not entirely improbable. We’ll get to the mathematics in a minute, but first consider: the weather system bringing Storm Goretti, which is due to dump more snow over much of the UK on Thursday, has already brought enough to rank as one of the country’s biggest snow events of the past 20 years.

It’s up there with the Beast from the East (2018) and the blizzards of 2010, says Iain Cameron, one of Britain’s best-known chionophiles and author of The Vanishing Ice: Diaries of a Scottish Snow Hunter. Apart from them, there’s been nothing like this since the 1980s. “God alone knows the tonnes of snow that have fallen over the past four or five days,” he says. It’s mindboggling.”

Yesterday it snowed from W1A east to Kent, west to Ireland and north to Bamburgh Castle. It didn’t settle everywhere but it did enough to lead the news. Inevitably, Scotland got the thickest blanket. The Met Office station at Tomintoul, near Aviemore, measured 52cm of fresh snow on a level base, and Cameron predicts drifts several times that deep in the Highlands.

Some of these will last deep into the spring and even summer. Many won’t because, like the 2018 event, this one is arriving from the north and north-east, and a peculiarity of air-flow patterns means its heaviest accumulations will be in south- and south-west-facing gullies, where melting happens fastest. In the meantime, though, 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for skiing and winter climbing north of the border – and for the building of snowpeople everywhere.

And so to the numbers. Professor Kenneth Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology, a physicist and snowflake expert, estimates that it takes about 100m good-sized snowflakes to make a snowman. (In yesterday’s conditions, a few degrees below freezing with abundant moisture in the air, these would probably have been classic stellar dendrite snowflakes – not as large as those formed around minus 12 degrees C, but handsome nonetheless.)

Libbrecht also has an estimate – which could be wrong by several orders of magnitude, but such is the nature of estimates when dealing with big numbers – of the average number of snowflakes falling on planet Earth per second throughout the year. This estimate is based on multiple factors including observed snowfall, average atmospheric moisture content and average snowflake numbers falling per second on measuring plates laid out on chilly days for the counting of such things. And it is: a million billion snowflakes per second, or 3,600,000,000,000,000 per hour.

In the northern hemisphere’s winter, most of those flakes will be falling in the northern hemisphere, whose surface area is roughly 1,000 times the UK’s. So, dividing the planet’s hourly snowflake rate by 1,000 and multiplying it by six (because in some parts of the country it snowed most of Tuesday while in others only for an hour or so), we reach an estimate for the number of snowflakes that fell in the course of the day in the UK. That estimate is 2,160,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.16 million trillion. Divide that by the number of flakes in a single snowman and you get a figure of 216 million – or, given the UK’s population of about 69.3 million, slightly more than three snowmen per person.

So if you didn’t manage to scrape one together, you don’t live in Aberdeenshire, or you weren’t trying.

Giles Whittell is the author of The Secret Life of Snow: the Science and Stories Behind Nature's Greatest Wonder

Photograph by Danny Lawson/PA