Gatwick weather: what to expect, and when it affects your flight

For today and the next few days, use the Met Office forecast for Gatwick linked in the panel beside this page. There is a deliberate reason no temperature is printed here: these pages are static, rebuilt when the facts change rather than every hour, so a live number baked into the HTML would be wrong more often than right. The same rule applies to today's security queues and today's delays.

During a named storm, the Met Office warnings page for the area is the more useful of the two. A yellow or amber wind warning is the earliest reliable signal that a flying day is going to be untidy, and it usually appears a day or more before airlines start cancelling.

What no forecast tells you is whether your own flight is affected. That only shows on the boards. Check Gatwick departures or Gatwick arrivals on the day, and check the airline's app too, because airlines normally cancel and re-book before the airport board catches up.

These are the Met Office 1991 to 2020 averages for Charlwood, the climate station about a mile west of the runway and the official record for Gatwick. Treat them as what a normal year looks like, not a forecast for yours.

The shape of that table matters more than any single figure. Gatwick has a real wet season: October, November and December each bring more than 90mm, while April and June sit near 51mm. That is a genuine autumn and winter concentration, and it is the opposite of Heathrow, where rainfall barely moves across the year. If you are choosing when to travel and the weather is a factor, late spring is the drier and more reliable end of the Gatwick year.

Gatwick and Heathrow are 25 miles apart, and most people assume their weather is the same. It is not, and the gap is large enough to be worth planning around.

Gatwick takes roughly a third more rain a year than Heathrow and has close to double the air-frost days, on nearly identical sunshine. The reason is position rather than latitude. Heathrow sits inside the west London urban heat island, surrounded by city that holds its warmth overnight and suppresses frost. Gatwick sits in open Sussex countryside on the southern side of the North Downs, which lifts and wrings out moist air coming off the Channel, and it has no city around it to keep the overnight temperature up.

For a traveller the frost number is the one that counts. Fifty-three frost mornings a year means de-icing is a routine part of a Gatwick winter rather than an occasional event, and de-icing takes time per aircraft. On a cold, clear winter morning the first wave of departures runs late more often here than at Heathrow, so an early flight in December or January deserves a little more slack in your plans than the same flight would need from Heathrow.

Most weather does not delay flights. Rain does not, and neither does ordinary cold, heat or cloud. Three things genuinely disrupt Gatwick, and the airport has one structural feature that makes all three bite harder than they would elsewhere: it has a single runway in regular use, and it is one of the busiest single-runway airports in the world. There is very little spare capacity to absorb a bad hour.

Fog is the main one. It rarely closes the airport, because the runway carries an instrument landing system good enough for very low visibility and most aircraft and crews are certified for it. What fog does is force air traffic control to put wider gaps between arriving aircraft, cutting the number of landings per hour. At a two-runway airport some of that can be absorbed. At Gatwick it cannot, so a foggy autumn or winter morning reliably produces delays and a batch of cancellations, and the knock-on runs through the day as aircraft and crews finish up out of position.

Frost and de-icing come second, and they are more of a Gatwick issue than a Heathrow one for the reason in the section above. Every aircraft has to be sprayed before departure on a frosty morning, the process takes several minutes each, and there are a limited number of rigs. The delay is rarely dramatic, but on the 06:00 wave it compounds.

Storms are the third. A strong crosswind on the single runway is the awkward case, and limits vary by aircraft type, so you often see smaller regional aircraft cancelled while larger ones keep going. Airlines usually thin the schedule pre-emptively the day before a named storm, so check the evening before rather than on the morning.

In every case the forecast tells you whether disruption is plausible, and only the live boards and your airline tell you whether it is happening to you.

Weather delays work differently from other delays, and it catches people out. Weather severe enough to make flying unsafe is an extraordinary circumstance under the UK261 rules, and that releases the airline from paying compensation. The fixed cash payouts that run into the hundreds of pounds do not apply to a fog morning or a storm.

What still applies, whatever the cause, is the duty of care. Past two hours late on a short-haul flight, three hours on medium-haul or four on long-haul, the airline must provide meals and refreshments appropriate to the wait. If the delay runs into the next day, it must provide a hotel and transport to it. If the flight is cancelled outright you keep the choice between a full refund and re-routing to your destination, again regardless of the weather.

Two practical notes. Airlines do not always offer the duty of care during weather disruption, when the desks are busiest, so ask for it. And if you end up buying your own meal or room because nobody was there to arrange one, keep the receipts and claim afterwards, because reasonable costs are recoverable even when compensation is not. The full detail, including how to escalate to the Civil Aviation Authority, is on Gatwick delays and cancellations.