Tromsø weather, daylight and snow, month by month

Where the numbers come from

Of the Tromsø pages on this site, this one rests on sources as firm as our Finnish pages. MET Norway publishes open climate data and runs Yr with NRK, and 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 behind the rest of the site.

The daylight figures are calculated. They come from the sun calculator our Finnish destination pages use, run for 69.649°N and 18.955°E, so you can set Tromsø’s day length against Ivalo’s or Rovaniemi’s on the same basis. We did not find an equivalent table from MET Norway or Tromsø kommune.

Every normal below carries one caveat. 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 these are almost certainly 1991 to 2020 figures, though no source says so directly.

Daylight on the 21st, from September to April

Calculated for Tromsø on the 21st of each month. On 21 December there is no sunrise to print.

The dark season comes in fast and goes out fast. Between 21 October and 21 November the town loses more than five hours of daylight, and it gets them back just as quickly on the way to February.

What happens between 28 November and 15 January

On 27 November 2026 the sun rises at 11:21 and sets at 11:42, the last sunrise of the year. From 28 November 2026 to 14 January 2027 it does not rise at all. On 15 January 2027 it rises at 11:35 and sets at 12:13, a day of 38 minutes; the 16th has 1 hour 15 minutes, the 17th 1 hour 40 minutes, and the 21st 2 hours 51 minutes. Visit Tromsø gives the same window as approximately 27 November to 15 January.

It is still not dark all day. On 21 December the sun does not rise, yet 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. That twilight matters: the idea that it is “dark all day” puts people off a month with four hours of light in the middle of it.

Sunrise on the calculator and sunlight in the streets are also different things. Visit Tromsø says the mountains around the town mean the sun 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, but we only found it in a search-result summary, never on a page we could open, so we have left it out.

The normal year at one station

Twelve months of normals for the station 1 km from town. Temperature and precipitation sit together because here the wettest months are also the darkest.

A normal December mean of -1.7 °C and a normal January mean of -3.0 °C describe a winter hovering around freezing, and the wettest months of the year are in autumn and early winter. 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.

One winter is a long way from the normal

A normal sits in the middle of a wide spread and tells you little about your week. At the same station, November 2025 came in 0.7 °C below normal, December 0.9 above, January 2026 3.2 below, February 0.7 below, March 4.0 above and April 2.5 above. January 2026 averaged -6.2 °C against a normal of -3.0; March 2026 averaged 2.1 °C against a normal of -1.9.

Midwinter thaws are normal on this coast. 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, went no lower than -4.9 °C, and took 157.8 mm.

We cannot tell you what a thaw does to the pavements. No source we opened describes Tromsø underfoot in those conditions, and we have not walked it ourselves.

One winter’s snow at the station

Observed snow depth at the station over three months: 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.

These are observations from a single winter, with no median or normal behind them, so they cannot be set against the FMI figures on our Finnish pages, which are median depths on a given date across thirty winters. We looked for a Norwegian snow normal for Tromsø. MET Norway publishes observed depth through Yr and cryo.met.no, and its statistics tool builds answers interactively, with no static page we could read. So this site does not know whether Tromsø gets more snow than any Finnish base, and we would sooner say so than guess.

Whales, winter roads and the midnight sun

Whale watching in Tromsø happens in a short winter window. 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 the whales are why you are going, plan around that window.

If you plan to drive, studded tyres are mandatory from October to May because of ice, and Visit Tromsø advises anyone not used to Arctic driving to slow down or take the bus.

At the other end of the year comes the midnight sun: around 20 May to 22 July on Visit Tromsø’s dates, which Fjellheisen describes as the whole solar disc staying above the horizon 24 hours a day. A standard sunrise and sunset calculation makes the no-sunset stretch a few days longer at each end, 18 May to 26 July 2027, because it measures by a slightly different definition.

What people get wrong

It is dark all day in December. It is not, and believing it sends people to the wrong month. On the solstice the sun does not rise, yet there are still 4 hours 22 minutes of twilight, with the sun 3.09 degrees below the horizon at midday.

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

Coastal Arctic means Finnish Arctic. Here the normal means sit either side of freezing and the wettest months are the dark ones, so clothes packed for an inland Finnish winter will not suit Tromsø.

Somebody can tell me my odds of a clear night. No source we opened publishes a figure for cloud cover, clear-night frequency or how often the aurora is seen from Tromsø. Visit Tromsø explains the mechanism and gives no odds, and we do the same.