Unusually hot weather in Finland left the southern part of the Scandinavian country on Wednesday with a sudden absence of snow and a rare delay in the onset of a “hot winter,” meteorologists said.

In mainland Finland, a maximum temperature of 7.9 °C was recorded and it reached 8.7 °C in Islas Aland, an autonomous region in the Baltic Sea.

the ‘‘thermal winter’ Tomo Bergmann of the Finnish Meteorological Institute explained that when freezing temperatures are set for a certain number of days. In southern Finland, where this usually happens in November, the average January temperature is -10 degrees Celsius.

It’s “highly likely” that southern Finland will be exposed to such high temperatures even in March, which happened in the winter of 2007-2008, Bergmann said.

Above average temperatures mean Finland has barely received a steady layer of snow north of the central city of Jyväskylä, about 270 kilometers northeast of Helsinki.

In the capital, residents were only able to cross-country ski custom gardens whose tracks are maintained with the help of snow cannons and other equipment.

Five icebreakers remain moored in Helsinki harbor as another sign of the onset of late winter. The Baltic Sea only froze in parts of the Gulf of Bothnia between them Finland and Switzerland, in the far north.

“This is a rare case, but it is not unique. Winter is very different They don’t necessarily look the same, Ano Yellarin, acting CEO of the parastatal shipping company Arctia, which operates the Finnish fleet of icebreakers, told Helsingin Sanomat.

In Norway, a neighbor FinlandThe temperature reached 19 degrees Celsius on January 2 in Gharbia Governorate Muir and Romsdal, smashing the previous record for maximum temperature in January.

According to Norwegian meteorologists, statistics show that winters are getting shorter in Norway, and there are fewer and fewer days with freezing temperatures.