In Finland, it has been warmer than 30 degrees Celsius for fourteen consecutive days. This breaks the heatwave record in the Northern European country after 53 years, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) announced on X on Friday.
Heatwaves like this are exceptional in Finland. “Temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius are extremely rare here,” FMI meteorologist Jaakko Savela told the BBC. In Finland, it is officially a heatwave when the temperature is higher than 25 degrees for at least three consecutive days.
The last time Finland experienced a heatwave was in 1972. Back then, it was above 30 degrees for thirteen consecutive days in the summer. The data has been recorded since 1961.
In Parikkala, near the Russian border, the heatwave record was first reported on Friday morning. But higher temperatures have also been recorded in more northern parts for some time. For example, Lapland, the area that stretches across the north of Finland, Norway, and Sweden and a part of Russia, had the warmest summer in two thousand years.
It is too early to attribute the record heat entirely to global warming, an FMI meteorologist told the AFP news agency. But climate change does increase the chance of such outliers, according to the expert.