Weather

Regarding the country's quite northern latitude the climate is very moderate - thanks to the Gulf Stream. The warm water from the Caribbean heats the sea and air around Scandinavia quite efficiently. You don't want to go outside on the same latitude of the American continent in winter. Copenhagen lies on the same latitude than Edmonton, AL, Canada where it usually gets -30 °C (= -22 °F) or less. The Gulf Stream heating works particularly efficient for Denmark. The country basically consists of some continental main land and thousands of islands scattered in the warm sea between Germany and Sweden. I once heard that the sea can be reached by car from every point in the country within less than 45 minutes.

But there is one problem to this position in the middle of the sea: strong winds. The wind in Denmark is basically doing a 24x7 job. Only in summer are there a few days when leafs and trees are dead still. Indeed, Denmark is one of the windiest places in Europe as seen on the weather map below. The picture shows the wind distribution over Europe on a typical winter day. The red arrows show wind direction and speed. The darker the arrow the higher the air speed. I guess I don't have to specifically point out the match between the dark arrows and Denmark...

Another peculiarity of Denmark and the whole Nordic is the way how daylight changes during the year. In winter, days are extremely short. It's already dark at 4 pm in December. In June, on the other hand, it hardly gets dark. The sun sets after 11 pm and the horizon towards the north keeps on being reddish - bluish until the sun rises again at around 3 am. In summer, the so-called Yellow Hour lasts by far longer than one hour. It can fill almost the whole evening with the sun creeping low over the horizon towards the north.

Since I'm interested in meteorology I sometimes tune in on the website of the Danish Meteorological Institute. Below are some remarkable satellite pictures I collected from their homepage:

Fog over the Baltic Sea. Note the wake in the lee of Bornholm Island (the arrow denotes the direction of the wind).

Hurricane over northern Europe. This winter-storm caused several casualties and severe flooding in England and Denmark. Moreover, vast areas of the Swedish forest were destroyed. Swedish matches should be quite cheap in the near future...

Pictures on this page by the Danish Meteorological Institute.