Summer job at the Norwegian meteorological institute

A lot of things have changed since I first made this blog and I have to admit that it has been pretty quite for a long time. The main reason is that I live in Norway now and I don’t get to enjoy the wonderful thunderstorms I did in Greece. I won’t lie, there’s plenty of weather in Norway, but it’s usually plain rainstorms or snowstorms. It cannot compare to the glory of Cumulus clouds growing into Cumulonimbus and a lightning night show. However, I am glad to live in Oslo, because since I either way have to be in Norway, the Eastern part of the country is where it is most likely to experience thunderstorms.

The reason I moved to Norway is studies. I am half Greek, half Norwegian and after finishing high school in Greece, I moved to Norway and now I have another two years of my meteorology studies. I have always been a fan of meteorology, so I can’t wait to start working as an meteorologist.

This summer I got a job at the Norwegian meteorological institute and we are (at maximum) 8  students who are sorting old meteorological observations of which some go all the way back to 1896. This project started last summer, but there is still more.

DNMI has a storage room inside of a bakery actually, so we are taking the archives with us at the meteorological institute we sort them and put them inside ISO-certified boxes and finally send them to The National Archives of Norway.

Retrieving from the storage room (inside of that door):

Unpacking, sorting and packing:
 
Delivering:
 

Now, another thing that has to be done is digitalizing all these observations! This is a work with no end in sight, so students are doing this as a part time job during the whole year. And this is now going to be my part time job next to the studies! We are actually ahead of the schedule when it comes to the project, so we might have to punch already from August.

Staying in Oslo this summer instead of in the seaside of Southern Norway means that I got to experience more convective summer thunderstorms, one of which broke a precipitation record. I will come back with time lapses and fotos.

Thunder season-premiere

The best thing about the weather getting warmer is that thunderstorms will sooner or later follow! We’ve had some pretty warm days in Norway and there were record high temperatures in Finland – 30oC in May. In Oslo we had 27oC on Friday 23/5 and the humidity was so high that the sky was white just like it usually is in Greece.

So, as a result of this weather, various Cumulonimbus were developing in the Southern Scandinavia and a huge Cumulonimbus cell that was causing several damages in Denmark the whole previous night was still active the following morning moving towards Oslo.

The arrow was a prediction, which was wrong, in my opinion. It should be to the northeast, because the cloud did come to Oslo, but had lost all its electrical activity. You can watch a time lapse video from that day, though the clouds were not as fascinating as I was hoping them to be.

Since the Danish storm brought us only rain, we had to rely on some other Cumulonimbus cloud of those around us. A thunderstorm passed by Oslo later at Friday night. Unfortunately, this is all I got:

On Saturday we were unlucky because it was like all thunderstorms were avoiding Oslo despite Eastern Norway in general being full of Cb clouds. Here is a time lapse of Saturday 24/5.

On Sunday there were no thunderstorms to see in Scandinavia in general, but some cells suddenly appeared Southwest for Oslo which didn’t affect the city, but distant lightnings were observed and I managed to get a great shot, too!

And here is a video of lightnings and a time lapse I decided to make of the many fotos I took hoping for a good lightning shot.