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<span class="lasLGY">Erika Benke</span>
<span>BBC News, Rovaniemi</span>
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<img src="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/1adc/live/0f9f1760-67a3-11f0-89ea-4d6f9851f623.jpg.webp" loading="eager" alt="BBC/Erika Benke A man dressed as Santa waves at the camera. He is standing on concrete and surrounded by pine trees but the landscape in snowless " class="">
<span>BBC/Erika Benke</span>
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"Make sure the reindeer have plenty of water - and don't forget to drink a glass every hour too," Santa reminds a team of elves busy making presents for next Christmas as Lapland swelters in a record heatwave.
It's not every day that Father Christmas finds himself briefing his elves about the hazards of sunstroke, but this summer northern Finland has seen temperatures hover around 30C for days on end.
As for Santa, he will be staying indoors most of the day - his bright red costume trimmed with fur is very warm.
"I'm only going out for a swim in the lake in the forest after 18:00, when the weather has started to cool off," he says.
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While Santa's workshop in the city of Rovaniemi is adapting with cheerful resilience, the unusually warm temperatures in the Arctic are a serious matter – and scientists are pointing at climate change as the culprit.
After an unusually cold and rainy spring and early summer, the whole of Finland – including the far north of Lapland, 500km (310 miles) above the Arctic Circle – suddenly became caught up in a continuous spell of hot weather.
By 25 July, the heatwave in Rovaniemi will have lasted 15 days.
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A heatwave is defined as a period of at least three consecutive days where the daily maximum temperature exceeds 25C.
Finnish Meteorological Institute's meteorologist Jaakko Savela explains that in Lapland, where temperatures over 30C are extremely rare, heatwaves like the current one are exceptional.
"The last time Finnish Lapland had a similarly long heatwave was in 1972," Savela says. But even that only lasted 12 to 14 days, depending on the exact location.
"That record has now been broken."
It's not just Rovaniemi that's been gripped by scorching temperatures. Several other weather stations across Lapland have registered their longest-ever heatwaves since records began.
The highest temperature of the heatwave, 31.7C, was measured at two locations, Ylitornio and Sodankylä, earlier this week. That's about 10C above the seasonal average for Lapland.
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