Is Swedish cold coming our way?

In Sweden, thousands of cars got stuck on the highway in a snowstorm. A mother and child were killed in an avalanche in Finnish Lapland. Train journeys were cancelled. Schools closed their doors.

Will that cold Scandinavian weather also come to the Netherlands? How? And is this Scandinavian winter special?

It is now extremely cold in large parts of Scandinavia. The village of Kvikkjokk in Swedish Lapland experienced the coldest January night in 24 years on Tuesday: 43.6 degrees Celsius below zero (the coldest recorded temperature in Sweden ever was 52.6 degrees Celsius below zero, in February 1966). During the night from Wednesday to Thursday, the temperature dropped again to below forty degrees below zero in many places in northern Sweden. In Oslo, meteorologists expect temperatures to drop to -15 to -20 degrees Celsius.

And if you look at the weather forecast for the Netherlands, you will see that it will also cool down here from this weekend. There is a chance of ice days: days when the temperature remains below zero degrees.

“The fact that it is now so cold in Scandinavia is because cold air lingers around the North Pole,” says meteorologist Yorick de Wijs by telephone from the KNMI weather room. This is due to the ‘jet stream’. That is a strong wind at an altitude of about ten kilometers, with an average speed of more than 100 kilometers per hour. Due to its length of several thousand kilometers, width of several hundred kilometers and the height of the wind, the jet stream looks like an elongated band.

De Wijs: “When the jet stream surrounds the Earth like a tight chain – as it does now – it forms a boundary that keeps the cold air in the north separated from warmer air in the south.” It is now difficult for the cold air from the north to reach us in the Netherlands. “It remains concentrated around the North Pole,” says De Wijs.

Accumulation of cold air

According to the meteorologist, it is not unusual that cold air accumulates in Scandinavia in winter. “That is typical for winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The cold may be more extreme this year than in other years, but that is part of the weather. Every winter is different, weather is always different. It’s chaos. Sometimes the jet stream is further north and it is not so cold in Scandinavia.”

Because the jet stream has been hanging over the Netherlands for a few weeks, it is now raining a lot here. Low-pressure areas and fronts form around the jet stream. Air rises, cools and then water vapor condenses into raindrops.

De Wijs: “Our weather models calculate that the jet stream will weaken from next weekend. The strength of the jet stream changes all the time. “No one understands exactly why that happens. But when the computer models show that it will happen, it is usually correct. The jet stream begins to meander. He swings in all directions for a moment. The border is weakening.”

And because the jet stream weakens, cold air from the areas near the North Pole can seep towards more southern countries such as the Netherlands. The air will be a lot less cold than it is now in Scandinavia.

“It is too uncertain to say exactly how cold it will be and whether we can skate in the Netherlands. You never know exactly where the cold air will flow and where high-pressure areas will form. According to model calculations, the really cold air will not reach us for a while. Moreover, the cold air (if the wind is northerly) must first cross the North Sea, causing it to warm up above the still relatively warm sea water.”

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