Lapland in Finland has the hottest summer on record September 2, 2024

Why is Lapland on fire? Finland's far north is set for a record summer of heat

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Lapland in Finland has the hottest summer on record

The Lapland region in the far north of Finland has been hit by the highest summer temperatures on record, an expert from the country's Meteorological Institute told AFP on Monday.

The Arctic has been warming almost four times faster than the rest of the world since 1979, according to Finnish and Norwegian researchers.

The months of June, July, and August saw record highs at almost every weather station in the northernmost areas of Finland.

The heat was caused by a high-pressure system combined with climate change, according to the institute.

The high temperatures contributed to droughts and large forest fires across the Scandinavian country.

“The summer in Lapland, Finland, was the hottest on record,” Mika Rantanen, a climate change researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told AFP.

The average temperature from June to August was 16.2 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit) for Finland as a whole, equaling the record heat of 1937.

In Sodankyla, a small town north of the Arctic Circle, the average temperature was 15.9 degrees Celsius, about 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it would have been without the effects of climate change, according to the weather agency.

“Northern Norway, northern Sweden, and even (the) Svalbard (archipelago) also had the hottest summer on record,” added Rantanen.

Also on Monday, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute noted that the Svalbard archipelago had its hottest summer for the third year in a row.

The Norwegian meteorological agency also said that several weather stations recorded record temperatures in August, even surpassing the previous records set in August of the previous year by two or three degrees Celsius.

The average temperature recorded at Longyearbyen airport, Svalbard's main town, was 11 degrees Celsius in August.

That's five degrees Celsius above normal.

The record high temperatures measured in Finnish Lapland exceeded the averages recorded since the beginning of the 20th century by 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius.

“The minimum temperatures were very high in Lapland... there was no cold spell,” added Rantanen.

The likelihood of such very hot summers is now approximately 70 times higher due to climate change than it was at the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish climate experts estimate.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, the probability of such hot summers was once every 2,000 years. But in today's climate, the probability is once every 25 years,” said Rantanen.

“If you extrapolate that into the future, it means that in the year 2050, this kind of hot summer will occur every five years,” he said.

ank/jll/jm