Tromsø weather, daylight and snow, month by month

Whose numbers these are, and whose they are not

This is the one Tromsø page on this site that stands as firmly as a Finnish one, and it is worth saying why before you trust a figure on it. MET Norway publishes open climate data and runs Yr with NRK. Yr names the station these temperatures come from: Tromsø (Vervarslinga), 1 km from the town. That is a primary source of the same weight as the Finnish Meteorological Institute records the rest of this site is built on.

The daylight figures are arithmetic, not a Norwegian authority. They come from the same sun calculator our Finnish destination pages use, run for 69.649°N and 18.955°E, so a reader can set Tromsø’s day length against Ivalo’s or Rovaniemi’s and be comparing like with like. We looked for an equivalent table published by MET Norway or Tromsø kommune and did not find one.

One caveat travels with every normal below. Yr calls the figure a 30-year normal and does not print the years anywhere we could read. MET Norway’s METreport 05/2021 states that 1991 to 2020 has replaced 1961 to 1990 as Norway’s standard normal period, so that is almost certainly what these are. Almost certainly is not the same as sourced, and this page says so instead of rounding it up.

Daylight on the 21st, from September to April

The 21st of each month, calculated for Tromsø. December has no sunrise to print.

The jump from November to December and back out again in February is the whole story of a Tromsø winter. Between 21 October and 21 November the town loses more than five hours of daylight. It gets them back just as fast.

What happens between 28 November and 15 January

On 27 November 2026 the sun rises at 11:21 and sets at 11:42, and that is the last of it. From 28 November 2026 to 14 January 2027 there is no sunrise at all. On 15 January 2027 it rises at 11:35 and sets at 12:13, a day of 38 minutes, then 1 hour 15 minutes on the 16th, 1 hour 40 minutes on the 17th, and 2 hours 51 minutes by the 21st. Visit Tromsø publishes the same window as approximately 27 November to 15 January.

Here is the sentence this page exists to refuse. It is not dark all day. On 21 December the sun does not rise, and there are 4 hours 22 minutes of twilight around a local midday of 11:42, with the sun’s highest point 3.09 degrees below the horizon. Twilight is not night, and the distinction matters: “dark all day” is the line that talks people out of a month with four hours of light in the middle of it.

The other direction of the same honesty: the sun clearing the horizon and the sun being visible from the streets are different events. Visit Tromsø says the mountains around the town mean it is usually not seen from central Tromsø until later in January, and gives no date. A specific date for the town’s first sunlight is repeated widely online, and we could only find it in a search-result summary, never on a page we opened, so it is not here.

The normal year at one station

Twelve months of normals for the station 1 km from town, temperature and precipitation together, because here the wettest months and the darkest ones are the same months.

Read the middle of that table twice. A normal December mean of -1.7 °C and a normal January mean of -3.0 °C describe a winter that hovers around freezing, and the wettest months of the year are the autumn and early winter ones. MET Norway’s Klimaprofil Troms gives the town an annual mean of 2.6 °C and 1,050 mm of precipitation over 1971 to 2000, a different period from the table above and named here as one.

One winter is a long way from the normal

A normal is the middle of a wide spread and never a forecast for your week. The same station’s last thirteen months make the point better than any warning: November 2025 came in 0.7 °C below normal, December 0.9 above, January 2026 a full 3.2 below, February 0.7 below, March 4.0 above, April 2.5 above. January 2026 meant -6.2 °C against a normal of -3.0. March 2026 meant 2.1 °C against a normal of -1.9.

Midwinter thaws are ordinary on this coast and not freak events. In December 2025 the station’s warmest reading was 7.0 °C on 25 December and its coldest -10.1 °C on 12 December, with 150.6 mm of precipitation across the month. In March 2026 it reached 8.3 °C on 18 March, dropped no lower than -4.9 °C, and took 157.8 mm.

What that does to the pavements is a question we will not answer. No source we opened describes what Tromsø is like underfoot in a thaw, and we have not walked it ourselves.

Snow we can report but never average

Three months of observed snow depth at the station: 73 cm on 4 December 2025, a maximum of 83 cm on 27 January 2026 with daily values across that month between 51 and 83 cm, and 91 cm on 1 March 2026.

Those are observations from one winter. They are not a median, they are not a normal, and they cannot be set against the FMI figures our Finnish pages carry, which are median depths on a given date across thirty winters. We went looking for a Norwegian snow normal for Tromsø. MET Norway publishes observed depth through Yr and through cryo.met.no, and its statistics tool builds its answers interactively, with no static page a fetch can read. So the honest position is that this site does not know whether Tromsø has more snow than any Finnish base, and will not be persuaded into a guess by the fact that the question is reasonable.

Two seasons that are not the sky’s

Whale watching in Tromsø is a winter thing and a short one. Visit Tromsø gives it as usually the beginning of November until the end of January, with orcas and humpbacks following the herring, and says the exact timing varies from year to year. If that is why you are coming, the window matters more than the month.

If you plan to drive, studded tyres are mandatory from October to May because of ice, and Visit Tromsø’s own advice to anyone not used to Arctic driving is to adjust the speed or take the bus instead.

The midnight sun is the year’s other end: around 20 May to 22 July on Visit Tromsø’s dates, which Fjellheisen states as the whole solar disc staying above the horizon 24 hours a day. A plain sunrise and sunset calculation puts the no-sunset stretch a few days wider at each end, from 18 May to 26 July 2027, because it is answering a slightly different question about the same sky.

What people get wrong

It is dark all day in December. It is not, and this is the version of the mistake we most want to kill, because it is the kind of confident absence that sends people to the wrong month. On the solstice the sun does not rise and there are still 4 hours 22 minutes of twilight, with the sun sitting 3.09 degrees below the horizon at midday.

The normal is what I will get. One recent January landed 3.2 °C below it and one recent March 4.0 °C above it, at the same station in the same winter.

Coastal Arctic means Finnish Arctic. The normal means here hover either side of freezing and the wettest months are the dark ones. Whatever you have packed for an inland Finnish winter is a different set of clothes.

Somebody can tell me my odds of a clear night. Nobody we opened publishes a figure for cloud cover, clear-night frequency or how often the aurora is seen from Tromsø. Visit Tromsø gives the mechanism and refuses the odds, which is the correct answer, and it is ours too.