Does Scandinavia really have hotter summers than the UK? (climate, warm, record)
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I've been looking a lot at Windy a lot recently and one thing I've been noticing both this summer and last is that Scandinavia - in particular Sweden and Finland, but also often Norway as well - seem to always just have much hotter weather than the UK and even other parts of far western Europe that are much further south such as Atlantic France and even NW Spain.
See attached image from a few days ago, which has been pretty constant for the last month or so and continues to be the case for at least another week according to Windy. See also the current forecast for Helsinki versus London, for example.
It was a similar picture last summer - weeks and weeks of Scandinavia right up to the Arctic showing consistent hot, sunny weather a good 10 degrees warmer than the UK and north-western continental Europe, which, while having bouts of good sunny weather in spring and autumn, seems to spend the summers being battered by one Atlantic depression after another. None of these ever seem to impact Scandinavia.
Oh, it's just because Scandinavia is much more continental, perhaps? But looking at average temps and climate data this does not actually seem typical. See, for example, the climate of Umeå, Sweden, compared to that of Oxford in the south of the UK. While the gap does narrow quite a bit in the summer, Oxford is still supposed to be a couple of degrees warmer - and between June and November - sunnier and drier too.
This is even more surprising as it is not just more continental Sweden and Finland that just seem a lot hotter, even coastal Norway - which is just as exposed to the Atlantic and much further north - seems to have enjoyed much better summer weather than the UK this year and last, with the area around Trondheim right on the north Atlantic coast often nicely about 25C and clear.
Can anyone explain what's happening here? Are the last two summer really an anomaly or does Scandinavia genuinely just get much hotter weather these days than the far west of Europe? If so why is the climate data so inaccurate?
I'd say UK is much more moderated by the Atlantic being an island an all but I'm sure someone much more knowledgeable than me on this stuff can answer it better. I'd say topography plays a role as well.
On 'average' its pretty close, London is warmer in the Summer than its Scandinavian counterparts but once you get into the north of the UK (Scotland) its a different story, the main difference between the temperatures of the UK and Scandinavia comes in the other 3 seasons particularly the winter months where the UK is much warmer.
I would not say it's hotter than Atlantic France, unless maybe we're talking about Brest or Cherbourg which are both hyper oceanic. Compare Nantes to Stockholm and you can see the former being 1c warmer in July and as much as 4c warmer in september. And that's using 81-10 for Nantes and 91-10 for Stockholm, so the difference might be higher.
The Stockholm data there is also from 1991-2020 where London's July average high for that period is higher at 23.9°C.
Given that these cities are mostly in the south of Scandinavia, it's impossible that as a whole Scandinavia could have summers anywhere near as mild/warm as London's given that most of it is cooler than these cities, which are already cooler than London. Let alone "alot warmer" LMFAO.
Last edited by Eman Resu VIII; 07-09-2021 at 08:01 PM..
The Stockholm data there is also from 1991-2020 where London's July average high for that period is higher at 23.9°C.
Given that these cities are mostly in the south of Scandinavia, it's impossible that as a whole Scandinavia could have summers anywhere near as mild/warm as London's given that most of it is cooler than these cities, which are already cooler than London. Let alone "alot warmer" LMFAO.
I will use those four cities you listed to illustrate the point:
Because inland Scandinavia and coastal eastern Scandinavia have a mix of oceanic and continental climate perhaps? So sometimes it's warmer and sometimes not, but it definitely can be warmer than London. This is not rocket science tbh
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