Saturday was the hottest day in Hong Kong’s recorded history, with the Hong Kong Observatory recording a maximum temperature of 36.3°C. As toasty at that sounds, it got even hotter around the rest of Hong Kong, with temperatures hitting a sizzling 37.9°C (!!!) in Happy Valley.
Coming in second was Sheung Shui, where it got up to 37.8°C, followed by Wong Tai Sin and Tseung Kwan O at 37.6°C, and Sham Shui Po at 37.3°C.
Here’s the map of the maximum temperatures recorded in different areas of Hong Kong on that historically hot day:
Looks like people who paid their respects to the Big Buddha were rewarded with cooler temperatures, as Ngong Ping had the lowest maximum temperature that day at 30.0°C.
The Observatory attributes the unusual high temperatures to Tropical Cyclone Soudelor, which brought a lot of hot air to Guangdong. The hot air was subsequently blown over to Hong Kong by northwesterly winds.
Saturday’s temperatures beat the record previously jointly held by August 18, 1990 and August 19, 1900. Here are the top 10 highest temperatures ever recorded by the Observatory:
Records began in 1885, long before Al Gore wowed the world with his Oscar-winning PowerPoint presentation, “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Header photo: Jaume Escofet via Flickr
Figure and table: Hong Kong Observatory
Reader Interactions