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– There have been very few hours of sunshine in Sweden during December. Many of our gauging stations have shown zero and it is quite extreme considering we are in a third of the month, says SMHI meteorologist Jon Jörpeland.
He counts a number of places like Visby, Norrköping and Stockholm where the sun has not been seen at all during December. Östersund has had four hours of sunshine and with that the city tops the country’s sunshine for the month. The darkness is also compounded by the lack of snow in most of inhabited Sweden.
– December is not a sunny month, mainly because the days are very short. Normally, it still reaches up to 30-40 hours of sunshine in Svealand and Götaland, and in Östersund in particular it is usually 17 hours on average, says Jon Jörpeland.
Behind this unusual weather situation is something called inversion. This means that the temperature increases with the height of the atmosphere and has as a consequence that the clouds do not clear up but rather settle as a cover between the sky and the earth.
– In this case, it is a strong high pressure on Russia that makes the climate so static and resists the low pressures that usually happen to us. Based on the forecast, it looks like the high pressure could weaken in the middle of next week, but it’s hard to say how the weather will change, says Jon Jörpeland.
This year’s winter is mild, with record temperatures in November in Stockholm and elsewhere in the south of the country. The meteorological winter, an average daily temperature below zero for five consecutive days, has so far only reached northwestern Svealand.
– We have a warmer climate and winters have become milder so the probability of extremes is greater. Even though we have an increasingly warmer world, we still have to keep the climate and climate separate, that is, the temperate climate now has nothing to do with climate change and we will certainly have several years of cold snowy winters in the future, says SMHI meteorologist Marcus. Sjöstedt.
