A harsh winter ends in northern Finland

Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features northern Finland as the region emerges from an exceptionally harsh and snowy winter.  

More snow fell in Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland, than the area has received in at least 60 years.

The snow arrived in October and persisted alongside freezing temperatures for months.   

According to NASA, some towns in northern Finland recorded almost triple their average snow cover in January. 

The snow began to melt when warm temperatures arrived in May, causing widespread flooding across nearby homes and farms.

The image was captured on May 25 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. 

Finland is a parliamentary republic consisting of 19 regions and 310 municipalities. The archipelago of the Åland Islands located southwest of the mainland is the only autonomous region of Finland. The climate in Finland varies due to the country’s relatively vast latitudinal differences; southern Finland is classified as having a humid continental climate with the rest of the country being characterised by a boreal climate. Finland can be considered to have a mainly boreal forest biome. More than 180,000 Finnish lakes have been recorded, which is why Finland is internationally called “the land of a thousand lakes”.

The majority of the population lives in central and southern Finland with over 1.5 million people living in the Greater Helsinki metropolitan area, which produces a third of the country’s GDP. The main language is Finnish,a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, which is unrelated to the Scandinavian languages. Swedish is the second official language of Finland, and is mainly spoken in certain coastal areas of the country and on Åland.

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens