 The snow cover starts forming in late October and melts in April, yet snow can lie on the mountain peaks around Akureyri for the whole year.Akureyri is a very cloudy town, averaging only 1,029 sunshine hours annually, with barely any sunshine between November and February, but precipitation is much lower than in southern Iceland because the prevailing winds are from the south — it is as little as a fifth as much as in Vík í Mýrdal.On January 1, 2015 Akureyri had a population of 18,191; of whom there were 9,011 males and 9,180 females.