I’ve referred to “The Danish Year” before on How to Live in Denmark. It’s a series of events that are simply expected to happen every year in Denmark, even if they aren’t formal holidays. In 2025 I’m going to try to do a podcast every month about aspects of the Danish year, and how they fit into the overall context of where Denmark is coming from, and where it’s going.
I always thought November was the rainiest of Danish months, but it isn’t, actually. That’s October. But November feels rainier, because the sky is so grey, and it gets dark so early, and the rain sometimes comes down in little freezing pellets.
Denmark is a watery country, not just its long coastline and many rivers and lakes, but also the fact it is mostly near sea level. Like the Netherlands nearby, it is extremely vulnerable to flooding.
Climate changes in recent decades have made it worse, and sudden cloudbursts – or skybrud– cause a lot of damage.
So retrofitting Denmark for even more water in the future has become a national obsession.
Officially, a skybrud or a cloudburst is defined as more than 15 millimeters of rain in less than 30 minutes, or 3 centimeters of rain in an hour. In these intense downpours, there is so much water that the soil and the drainage systems can’t absorb it.