BEIJING: Temperatures in more than a dozen different Chinese cities have hit record seasonal highs this week, with main central China’s Zhengzhou and Wuhan more than 10C hotter than average for early March, showed the official data.
Wuhan which is located on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, registered temperatures of 26C on Monday, 12 degrees higher than the long-term early March average, while Beijing and surrounding cities saw temperatures reach 25C earlier this week.
Record high temperatures
China experienced months of extreme heat temperature the previous year, with 267 weather stations breaking records, measuring temperatures in excess of 40 degrees during a 70-day summer drought that targets the entire Yangtze River basin, triggering fires and damaging crops.
The China weather Bureau warned that 2023 would be another year of extreme weather due to global climate change.
The southwestern province of Yunnan, a main hydropower base, is in the middle of a prolonged drought forecast to last into April, with average rainfall more than 60% lower than usual since November last year.
According to state media, the Poyang, the country’s biggest freshwater lake and a main flood outlet for the Yangtze, has failed to recover from the previous year’s drought, with water levels on Monday falling close to their record low.
Chinese weather officials said that at a routine monthly press briefing the previous week that average temperatures for the whole of February were 1.6C higher than normal, with average rainfall 3.9% lower than the average.
Changing weather patterns mean that spring has come early to several regions south of the Yangtze River, in few cases as many as twenty days earlier than normal, said Gao Rong, vice director of the National Meteorological Centre.
Low-pressure conditions this week have also contributed to smog buildups throughout the pollution-prone region of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei in northern China, where heavy industrial activities have been ramped up.
