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Lauren James

No one can deny that Hong Kong has had a lashing this year, and it wasn’t just on the city’s protest-hit streets – 2019 has been one of the stormiest and wettest on record.
Thunderstorms battered the city on 59 days between February and October, an unusually high number and almost 50 per cent above the annual average.
The prevalence of storms this year is on a par with 2014; no other year exceeds 53 days. (Storms in November and January are uncommon, though not unheard of, while there has never been a storm in December since Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) records began in 1947.)
Rumbles of thunder provided the soundtrack to many of the summer’s political demonstrations, which began on June 9 with a mass march in temperatures reaching 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit). Protesters’ resolve was tested by numerous downpours as the months wore on.

The most intense storm occurred on Saturday April 20; it produced 9,094 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, the highest on record for April since the observatory launched its lightning location system in 2005. A single afternoon of freak weather turned day into night and wreaked havoc, killing one man through a lightning strike and another in a boating accident and triggering the HKO’s first red rainstorm warning of the year.
Ed Sheeran fans might remember the weather two days earlier, on April 18, more clearly: thunder, lightning and heavy rain saw the British singer-songwriter cancel the second of two evening performances at Hong Kong Disneyland because of safety fears, with thousands of young fans left stranded in the rain for hours.

The annual number of days with thunderstorms is increasing at a rate of about two days per decade, based on the period between 1947 and 2018, an HKO spokesman said. Clues to this phenomenon are to be found at high altitudes.
“Analysis of Hong Kong upper air conditions shows that the atmosphere has generally become more unstable in recent decades and thus it is more favourable to the occurrence of thunderstorms,” the spokesman said.
With the relentless thunder came buckets of rain. By October, 2,382.7mm (93.8 inches) had fallen, 2 per cent more than the yearly average for the period. Though the city did not experience a typhoon as extreme as 2018’s Super Typhoon Mangkhut – officially the city’s most intense – Hongkongers were still forced to deal with heavy rain and flooding throughout late spring and early summer.

This year also saw an “exceptionally hot” June to August, the HKO said. Average temperatures were 0.4 Celsius above the norm.
“The mean minimum temperature of 27.2 degrees, mean temperature of 29.2 degrees and mean maximum temperature of 31.8 degrees were, respectively, the second, third and fourth highest on record for the same period,” the HKO said.
The year’s 33 “very hot weather” warnings fell between May 19 and October 1, with August clocking a six-day streak when the daily maximum temperature was equal to or greater than 33 degrees Celsius.
Though 2019 did not yield a record-breaking number of very hot days (2016 had the most, at 38 days), it was still comfortably inside the top 10 on record, with most of those years falling within the past decade.
As well as this year’s summer solstice being the warmest yet, at 30.8 degrees, there were 46 hot nights recorded, those in which temperatures equalled or exceeded 28 Celsius – five more than in 2017, when the previous record of 41 was set.
If we do not take urgent climate action now, then we are heading for a temperature increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with ever more harmful impacts on human well-being.
WMO secretary general Petteri Taalas
July turned out to be particularly scorching: the month began with torrential rain, yet clocked a mean temperature of 29.5 degrees Celsius – 0.7 degrees higher than normal.
Hong Kong’s trend of steadily climbing temperatures is mirrored across the globe: the last decade has been the hottest on record, warming oceans and making extreme weather events, such as forest fires, droughts and hurricanes, more likely.
This year will be the second or third warmest in recorded history, and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which hit a record last year, are continuing to rise, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said its provisional statement on the State of the Global Climate, released on Tuesday.
WMO secretary general Petteri Taalas said the world was “nowhere near on track” to meeting the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“If we do not take urgent climate action now, then we are heading for a temperature increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with ever more harmful impacts on human well-being,” Taalas said.


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Extreme Hong Kong weather and how it compares to the rest of the world

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Lifestyle


Thunderstorms battered the city on 59 days between February and October, about 50 per cent more than the average
There were 46 hot nights, in which the temperature equalled or exceeded 28 degrees Celsius – five more than in 2017, when the previous record of 41 was set



Thunderstorms battered the city on 59 days between February and October, about 50 per cent more than the average, and there were a record number of hot nights.


Hong Kong weather

Extreme weather

Typhoon Mangkhut

Climate change