'It is not going to be a good idea to take a boat out on the sea for Juhannus this year,' smiles 'Frog Professor' Taisto Heikkinen from Hyyrynsalmi near Oulu. 'There might be electric storms,' he added. 'It's very likely to rain and the temperature's going unpredictable.'
Heikkinen bases his forecast on his collection of frogs, which he has been studying for the last thirty years. Apparently, the height of their jumps directly correlates with what the weather's going to be like in the coming weeks. 'If they jump about 30cm . . . that is not good. That means there's going to be rain and it's going to be cold. If they jump 60cm then it's going to warm. And if they don't jump at all then it's going to be cold in a week.'
At the moment, the behaviour of the frogs leads the seventy-two year-old 'Frog Professor', who runs a website promoting his frog expertise, to predict that it is certainly going to rain 'and there may be storms.' Metereologists agree with the frogs that it's not goling to be a perfect Juhannus.
According to weather forecaster Mikko Laine, 'It would be a good idea to pack rain garments for midsummer but summer clothes as well.' In the Oulu area, and the north more broadly, it is not going to be as rainy as the south. In fact, it is predicted to be quite warm but there will be rainclouds in the sky everywhere, darkening the brightness of the year's shortest night. So umbrellas and summer clothes will be the order of the night.
Laine claims that summer showers are particularly difficult to forecast because they can develop very quickly, in as little as half an hour. This is especially true when there is particularly wearm weather. The showers can be extremelyt light, frequent and highly localised which makes the weather forecaster's job almost impossible.
'It's a pity that Juhannus is in June,' laments Laine. 'If it were in July, there would be much more of guarantee of sunshine and good weather. July is always warmer and it'll be better in northern Finland than in the south.' So both frogs and forecasters agree on a warm but annoyingly wet Juhannus.
According to historian Daryn Lehoux of the University of Hong Kong, frog behaviour has long been used to predict the weather across the world. But tribes usually rely on the loudness of frogs' croaking to tell whether or not rain is on the way.
