Beijing endured unusually rainy, smoggy, cloudy 2015
Xinhua, January 12, 2016 Adjust font size:
Beijing experienced an unusually high number of rainy, smoggy and cloudy days in 2015, the municipal weather bureau said on Tuesday.
Annual rainfall in the city was 598.1 mm, 42.1 percent more than 2014 and 10.4 percent more than the average figure from 1981 to 2010, according to the bureau.
The city's observatory recorded 77 days with precipitation last year, with 67 rainfalls during the flood season, about 50 percent more than during the same period of 2014.
Beijing was choked by 27 bouts of smog, nearly half of them in January, November and December.
The capital also recorded the longest cloudy period since 1951. Beijingers saw less than three hours of sunshine every day for the 18 days from Nov. 5 to 22.
The analysis found that the annual average temperature was 12.2 degrees Celsius, with a high of 38.9 degrees and a low of 9.2 degrees below zero.
Fewer dusty days were seen in 2015 -- just four. But Beijing also experienced its first sand storm in 12 years on April 15, when the PM10 concentration surged to 2,000 micrograms per cubic meter. Endi