South China’s Guangzhou reports ‘earliest summer since 1961’ in global warming, El Nino double whammy
- Guangzhou entered the summer season on March 23, city’s meteorological bureau announces on Saturday
- It is the ‘earliest onset of summer’ since full records began in 1961, with previous record set on March 26, 2021, local daily reports
Meanwhile, more than 1,100km (700 miles) to the north, authorities in Beijing have declared the arrival of spring – also much earlier than usual.
Guangzhou entered the summer season on March 23, the city’s meteorological bureau announced on Saturday.
“This marks the earliest onset of summer in Guangzhou since complete meteorological records began in 1961. The previous record was set on March 26, 2021,” local daily Yangcheng Evening News reported.
Typically, summer in Guangzhou would begin on April 16. However, over the past decade, the season has consistently started earlier, including four years when it arrived in March, the report said.
Saturday’s announcement from Guangzhou officials came as prematurely high temperatures were reported across most of southern China.
“This afternoon, temperatures in most parts of the south exceeded 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), with some areas even reaching 30 degrees,” the Central Meteorological Administration said. “Among them, Hefei and Nanjing broke their local records for the highest March temperatures, while Hangzhou and Shanghai experienced their first 30 degrees-plus days of the year,”
Every day, meteorological bureaus calculate the average temperature of the past five days, to find the “five-day moving average”.
Under the national standard for the “division of climatic seasons”, the first time this moving average exceeds 22 degrees Celsius is designated as the start of summer.
Similarly, spring begins when the five-day moving average exceeds 10 degrees Celsius.
Beijing announced the arrival of spring this year on March 13, nearly a fortnight earlier than the usual March 26.
Much of the premature highs are blamed on the El Nino climate pattern, which involves the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific.
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The central and eastern equatorial Pacific has been experiencing a moderate El Nino event since last May.
Jia Xiaolong, deputy director of China’s National Climate Centre, warned in February that influence of El Nino was likely to cause higher than average spring temperatures across most of China.
On March 5, the World Meteorological Organization reported that the 2023-24 El Nino event had peaked in December as one of the five strongest on record. The phenomenon was “gradually weakening” but would “continue to impact the global climate in the coming months” the report said, forecasting above normal temperatures “over almost all land areas between March and May”.
According to The Washington Post, several cities in the United States this year experienced their warmest February on record.
The combined impact of global warming and El Nino made 2023 the warmest year for the Earth since 1951, with many regions around the world breaking high temperature records.
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The trend is likely to continue. “Global carbon dioxide emissions are still at their peak. By [the end of] 2024, we might again say it was the warmest year on record,” Wei Ke, deputy director of the Monsoon System Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics said.
Against the backdrop of global warming, extreme weather events would become increasingly frequent, he warned, according to an interview posted online by mainland media company Yitiao.
Studies suggest that, as the planet warms, El Nino events could become more frequent and severe, altering precipitation patterns that impact agriculture, water supply and natural ecosystems.
