Country sees record warmest June this year

Temperatures in June either set new records, or were exceptionally high in most parts of the country, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI).

For the most part, only in parts of Finnish Lapland was June merely “unusually warm”, which means that temperatures were reached that occur on average once every 10-30 years, said FMI in a press release on Thursday.

The average temperature for the entire country was a record-high 16.5 degrees Celsius. This exceeds the previous record set 1953 by 0.3 degrees Celsius.

The average temperature for the month ranged from about 20 degrees in the southeast to just under 10 degrees in the northwest arm of Finnish Lapland.

The temperatures were 2-6 degrees above the long-term averages. The average temperature at Helsinki's Kaisaniemi weather station was 19.3 degrees, the highest since keeping records began in 1844.

Temperatures in June crossed the hot-weather threshold of 25 degrees on a total of 25 days, which is the largest number of days since the keeping of digitised daily records began in 1961.

The observation station with the greatest number of hot days was the airport of Niinisalo in Kankaanpää, where the temperature exceeded 25 degrees on 19 days.

The month's highest temperature, 33.6 degrees Celsius, was measured in Koitsanlahti in Parikkala on June 25.

This was just two tenths of a degree short of the all-time June temperature record set in Ähtäri in 1935. The month’s lowest temperature reading, minus 2.4 degrees, was measured at Saana in Kilpisjärvi, on 16 June.