Snowmen alarmed by springlike temperatures
Dreaming of a white Christmas? Don’t hold your breath. Temperatures in some southern Swiss valleys, such as this one in Weesen, canton St Gallen, reached around 20 degrees Celsius on December 24.
The mercury already hit 17.3 degrees in Basel in the morning and eventually reached a record 20.2 degrees in Reigoldswil, canton Basel Country. The previous Christmas Eve temperature record was 17.8 degrees, set in 2009 in the Rhein valley in canton St Gallen.
Monday's temperatures made it the warmest Christmas Eve in Switzerland overall since 1977, according to the weather service Meteomedia.
In other parts of the country, however, it was definitely not T-shirt weather. In Chiasso on the Italian border it was minus 4.2 early in the morning – almost as cold as the “Swiss Siberia” La Brévine, on the western border with France, where it dropped to minus five.
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