Life In Sweden: Walking on Frozen Lake M�laren

Ice Skating Lake M�laren

Hear the Otherworldly Sounds of Skating on Thin Ice

On thin ice with a bath

Cross-country skating on Lake M�laren

Hall floor at M�laren

Stockholm morning in -12 Celsius:
the ice is setting on lake M�laren

Ice skating
in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden

In Sweden
You Can Ice Skate to Work

Ice manning - ice assessment
of fresh water core ice in place

Moose in the drink

Ice boating with Nora � A 100+ year old ice boat

Monotype-XV European Championship 2024
Day 1, 5th feb 2024

Stunning Ice Sailing Championship
in Sweden 2023: Monotype-XV

Snowstorm over Stockholm in 1934

Snowstorm in Stockholm, Sweden
Snowy Winter Walk (4K)

Capsized Iceboat rescue

Drone film over M�larhojden and lake Malaren, October 2023 (my neighbourhood)

2024-02-26

Now the average temperature in Stockholm has been above zero degrees seven days in a row.
And that means meteorological spring is here.

SMHI calculates from the first day it was spring temperatures, which means that it was already spring last Monday.

- It was confirmed last night, says meteorologist Moa Hallberg at SMHI.

Does not back down
And it can't be winter again � even if the temperatures drop below zero.

- Even if it gets colder, it counts as spring has arrived.

When will it be summer then?

- We do not make such long-term forecasts for the public, but it is far in the future.

Memory is short.

That's what Gunilla Svensson, professor of meteorology at Stockholm University, states when she tries to answer the question of whether it really is a record winter this year.

- I remember when I grew up in the highlands of Sm�land. It was not unusual for it to be minus 30 degrees in the winters, she says.

When SMHI mapped how cold this year's winter was and compared it to previous years, it turned out that only one place broke a cold record. It is Kvikkjokk, where minus 43.6 degrees was recorded on January 3.

In other parts of the country, the weather has indeed been cold, but by no means extreme. You only need to go back a year or two to note similar cold snaps in, for example, northern Uppland.

But one observation is true, according to Gunilla Svensson. Really cold periods are a little more unusual today than 30 years ago.

- There has been a change due to climate change. Globally, last year was almost 1.5 degrees warmer (than pre-industrial times, editor's note). So we are a little more used to it being really cold.

Therefore, it can get extra cold
This is something that can be seen in SMHI's long-term climate data. When you go back 30 or 60 years, the winters were colder and the summers somewhat cooler than today. And it was somewhat more common with really cold days.

According to Gunilla Svensson, the reason that it gets very cold at all for a period is a combination of favorable circumstances.

- It happens when air that has spent time in the Arctic or in Siberia and cooled down, then moves towards us.

If it is also cloudless, there is nothing to prevent the little heat energy that remains in the air from being radiated into space, so that it becomes even colder.

As long as there is no wind, the cold air remains, but the weather can change quickly when either warm winds come to blow the cold air away or clouds form.

Clouds at low altitude in the winter create a greenhouse effect which means that a large part of the energy that would otherwise have been radiated into space instead stays on the ground.

There is one more factor that can be favorable for cold weather and that is how much snow there is. A snow-covered surface cools down more easily.

You could imagine that it creates a self-reinforcing weather system, where the snow makes it even colder and the air stays around longer.

Very true, it sometimes happens that a high pressure park over Sweden and creates a "locking" in the weather.

- We usually call that blocking. They mean that the low pressures (which create warmer weather in winter, editor's note) simply do not arrive, but they go south or north of the high pressure. In winter, this often means that it gets very cold, she says.

But Gunilla Svensson kills all theories that it would be possible to make forecasts for more than a couple of weeks in our latitudes.

- The atmosphere has a short memory. It is a chaotic system where a lot can happen. This means that you can make forecasts for a maximum of 10�15 days.

In 2023, heat records were broken
But even shorter periods than that can be difficult to predict. Anyone who has followed the forecasts in recent weeks has noted that the record cold that threatened to hit Stockholm last week did not materialize.

Erik Kjellstrom, professor of climatology at SMHI, states that there are a large number of variables that affect the weather on a winter's day, for example wind, how much snow is on the ground and cloud cover.

- If any of those factors change a little, it can have very, very big consequences, he says.

The fact that Sweden had a cold winter means practically nothing at all for the global climate. 2023 was a record warm year globally. Even 2024 may well break new temperature records despite our wolf winter.

- Now we have cold up here over Northern Europe and Scandinavia. It is also cold over large parts of Canada and the USA, says Erik Kjellstrom.

He continues:

- But if you look at a global map, there are more and significantly larger areas that have warm deviations. So the global average temperature is higher than it was a number of years ago.