The weather outside is frightful: Östersund weather news

I’m sure you’ve probably seen this tweet making the rounds this morning:

This picture was taken yesterday morning outside Östersund’s ground, where Arsenal will be Europa League-ing next Thursday. That’s a lot of snow! Especially for those of us on the west coast, who don’t see snow very often unless we go to the mountains to go skiing. That much snow must have been a full on snowpocalypse, shutting down everything in its path, right?

Nope, probably not.

There’s a couple things to consider here: First, that snow probably didn’t all fall at once - that appears to be plowed piles of snow with fresh snow on top of it. In case you didn’t know, Sweden is cold this time of year - that’s what happens when you’re right up there close to the Arctic Circle. This is where Östersund is:

So yeah, once snow starts falling there, it doesn’t go anywhere till spring, probably.

And even if all that snow DID fall at once, Sweden, being Sweden and being used to this sort of weather, would almost certainly have a plan in place to deal with snow removal at the stadium so the game could still go on. The bigger concern in a snowpocalypse-type setting is flying in and out, but the stadium itself would almost certainly be ready to go, and will almost certainly not be an issue next week.