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WEATHER

Sweden sees ‘heavy and persistent’ snowfall on Saturday

Swedish weather forecaster SMHI has warned of "heavy and persistent" snowfall in parts of the east coast on Saturday with some areas already reporting 25-cm-deep snow.

Published: 19 November 2022 12:42 CET
Tourists walk past a soldier of The Royal Guard outside the castel in Stockholm during a heavy snowstorm.
Tourists walk past a soldier of The Royal Guard outside the castel in Stockholm during a heavy snowstorm. 'Heavy and persistent' snowfall is predicted across parts of Sweden's east coast on Saturday. Photo: SVEN NACKSTRAND / AFP

The wintry weather is expected to spread to many other parts of the country and traffic may also be affected, SMHI said.

This comes after an unusually mild autumn with temperatures as high as 16.7 degrees as recently as November 12th.

“It has been snowing quite a lot,” SMHI’s Therese Fougman told Swedish newswire TT.

An orange warning for snowfall is in place over parts of Götaland’s east coast, where it started to snow overnight on Friday, mainly in an area stretching from Oskarshamn and slightly south.

In an orange warning, there is a risk of very limited accessibility on roads and public transport service delays and cancellations.

On Saturday morning, SMHI reported that the snow was 25 centimetres deep in Oskarshamn, 11 centimetres in Orrefors and 12 centimetres in Hoburg in Gotland.

The snowfall would continue to be heaviest along the east coast at the beginning of the day on Saturday, Fougman said.

However, the intensity was expected to slow down gradually over the course of the evening when winds would also subside. But the forecaster expected further snowfall on Sunday.

Yellow warnings are in place for Gotland, Öland, southern Skåne and parts of the coast of Götaland and Svealand as snowfall is expected to move in during the day on Saturday or overnight. 

A yellow warning means that some public transport services and road traffic may be disrupted. 

“You hope that people think about it: do I have to go out and drive or can I wait? That you think before you go, plan a little, and allow extra time if you are going a long way,” Fougman said.

Yellow warnings remain in place for the whole of Sweden until Tuesday with the forecaster anticipating milder temperatures in the tail end of next week.

Swedish vocab: snö – snow

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WEATHER

Sweden’s far north just had one of its hottest summers on record

New stats from state weather agency SMHI have revealed that, despite rain, wind and low temperatures in some areas, the far north of Sweden saw record-breaking heat this summer.

Published: 3 September 2024 14:29 CEST
Updated: 3 September 2024 16:41 CEST
Sweden's far north just had one of its hottest summers on record

In Götaland and Svealand – central and southern Sweden, temperatures were roughly the same this summer as they were between 1991 and 2020. 

However, the average summer temperature was hotter further north. In northern Norrland, temperatures were “very warm, or even extreme,” the weather agency said in a statement.

Karesuando, Abisko and Katterjåkk/Riksgränsen weather stations, which have all carried out temperature measurements for over 110 years, all either broke or neared their previous temperature records, set in 1937.

Records were also broken at weather stations which started recording temperatures after 1937, like Nikkaluokta, Naimakka, Tarfala, all in Lappland, and Överkalix-Svartbyn in Norrbotten.

Kiruna saw the second hottest summer since 1937, and Pajala and Luleå, which both started recording temperatures in 1944, saw their hottest summers since 2002.

Despite this, the hottest temperature this summer was reported in Uppsala, where the mercury hit 32 degrees C on June 28th. Ljusnedal in Jämtland saw the coldest summer temperature: just -2.4C on June 7th.

That may sound low, but according to the agency it’s a “very high minimum temperature” for the summer season. The last time a similarly high temperature was measured during the summer was in 2022, when temperatures dropped to -2.2 degrees in Latnivaara in Lappland.

The only tropical days in the country – days where temperatures didn’t drop below 20C – were also recorded in Norrland, on June 24th and 25th.

In other areas of the country, like Norrköping and Gällivare, the summer months were wetter than usual, with the former breaking a record set in 2011. Gällivare saw the third rainiest summer since records began, just behind the summers of 1954 and 1961.

Gladhammar, in eastern Småland, saw the rainiest single summer day, with 88.8mm of rain falling on July 13th.

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