One country in Europe that’s bucked the trend of a warm summer in 2023 was Iceland. I’ve noticed this in the monthly anomaly charts for mean temperature that I produce, so I decided to spruce up my chart grid viewer to see if I was right in my assumption, and as you can see in this chart of weekly mean anomalies I was. What caused it is may have been persistent high pressure across the Greenland ice cap to the northwest of Iceland, and a shift southward of the Icelandic low, which in turn allowed more days of northerly or north-westerly flows and hence the lower than average temperatures.
It’s not easy to verify these findings because even the Icelandic Met OfficeUKMO The Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy site offers no real clues to how they categorised this summer’s temperatures. If you’re by any chance reading this in Iceland, please let me know how you found it😉