Dutch weather

The Netherlands, with its long coastline on the North Sea, has a temperate maritime climate. This means mild winters, cool summers and much more rain than its inhabitants would like. There are, of course, magnificent snowy days in the winter and great days for the beach and barbecues in the summer, just not enough of them.

Winter

During the last three decades of the twentieth century the average temperature during December was 4°C. The last very cold December days of that century were in 1995, when the average temperature was -0.9°C. Even January is no longer the ‘month of ice’ it used to be. According to the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), only the occasional January has been really cold – notably in 1996 and 1997, when the Elfstedentocht was last held in the Netherlands. This is an eleven-town ice-skating marathon that only takes place when all the lakes and canals in Friesland freeze solidly enough to support thousands of skaters and spectators.

Western winds

This gradual warming of Dutch winters over the course of the twentieth century is attributed to the uncommon strength of the western winds. These allow the warm sea temperature (7°C) to influence the winter temperature, resulting in rainy winters instead of snowy ones. Gales are frequent on the coast, particularly in autumn and winter.

The flat landscape makes the Netherlands a rather windy place at all times of the year. This explains why, as of the Middle Ages, the Dutch built so many windmills to pump water from low-lying areas and reclaim land from the sea and the rivers

Summer

And the summers? The average temperature for July tends to be 17.4°C, but summer weather is extremely changeable. Warm and dry one year, cool and wet the next. Or warm and dry this week with temperatures from 22°C to 26°C, and suddenly cool and wet the next, with the thermometer barely topping 16°C.As a result, the Dutch are rather obsessed with the weather. Whenever the sun comes out, they go out. Leisure activities tend to be planned – and changed – around the weather, with museum visits suddenly dropped in favour of cycle trips, and vice versa. When people come back from a holiday, the first thing friends and colleagues ask is not whether they had a good time, but whether they had good weather.

(NB: though cool and wet summers immediately trigger the global warming debate, the KNMI says that Dutch summers have been like this since before the Middle Ages.)

2010
The particularly heavy snowfall on 23 and 24 December last year came just in time to give us a romantic, white Christmas for the second year in a row, the eighth in 110 years, December normally has two days when the temperature stays below freezing; this year - the coldest winter in 40 years - there were 12.

Was the rest of the year as in tune with the seasons as well? May was cool, but July was one of the warmest ever, with temperatures well over 30°C, 692 hours of sun (versus 591 in 2009) and the accompanying heavy thunderstorms. August was the second wettest after 1901, and the fall went straight from cool to uncharacteristically cold, ending in three weeks of snow. All in all, despite the scorching month of July, 2010 was the coolest in 15 years, with 29 days of ice, versus nine in 2009, and 88 days of frost, compared to 56 in 2009!