"We have forecasts for ten days ahead, and it looks like the cold air is still there. It's probably at the end of next week that some low pressure could possibly arise, bringing temporarily slightly milder air to southernmost Sweden, with an occasional degree above zero or around zero," says meteorologist Linnea Rehn Wittskog at SMHI.
The cold persists due to a high-pressure blockage.
"You get a cold, stable high pressure in winter that simply gets stuck. It takes a fairly deep or strong low pressure to upset it."
As is well known, January brought both large amounts of snow and cold - bitter cold in the north. Now, during the first week of February, it is still white in almost the entire country and SMHI has recorded four national ice days. One of these means that all weather stations in the whole of Sweden have remained below zero degrees for the entire day. The first occurred last Sunday, then on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
"Ice days are not common. Most often it's a few degrees above zero at the southernmost coastal stations. It's actually not every year that there's a national ice day," says Linnea Rehn Wittskog.
This was the case in 2025, for example. The last time Sweden had a national ice day was at the beginning of January 2024.
