Winter can be measured, day by day

Everyone knows it is darker in the north. Few know by how much, and almost nobody thinks about it until the first of December after the move.

Climate is the factor people underestimate most when they move within Sweden, probably because you always visit a new place in summer.

A slider for day of the year

Pick a climate indicator on the map and a slider appears: day one to day 365. The colours across all 290 municipalities update as you drag. You can follow how the country changes through the year instead of looking at an annual average that hides the entire point.

What is there: hours of sunshine, temperature, rainfall, snow and maximum wind.

What you find when you drag it

• The darkness is harsher than you think. The difference in daylight between the far south and the far north in December is hours, not minutes.
• Snow is about the number of days, not centimetres. What shapes daily life is how many days a year you scrape the windscreen and shovel, not how deep the record snowfall was.
• Coast and inland differ more than north and south at the same latitude. The sea evens things out, the inland swings.
• The rain is not where you assume. The west coast and the mountain edge get the most, and parts of eastern Sweden are surprisingly dry.

Use it as a reality check

If you are considering moving north, drag the slider to mid December and look at the sunshine hours. If you are considering the west coast, drag it to November and look at rainfall. It is not a verdict on any place, it is simply the part of daily life no viewing ever shows you.

And the other way round: if you find a municipality that meets your requirements on price and commuting and also gets more sunshine than the one you live in now, you have found something hard to put a value on and easy to notice in February.

Photo: G och J, the station house in Vilhelmina, Sweden, March 2019. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. The image has been cropped and downscaled.