China floods: how Zhengzhou’s ‘once in a thousand years’ rainfall compares
- City recorded a year’s worth of rain in just days, with a record 201.9mm falling in an hour
- WMO calls it ‘extremely serious’ and says extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change
The death toll across the province reached 33 on Thursday, and authorities said more than 3 million people had been affected.
“Zhengzhou received more rainfall in four days than it would do in an average year. This is extremely serious,” a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization said.
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The city’s average annual rainfall is 641mm (25 inches), according to the UN climate agency.
But 617.1mm (24 inches) of rain fell over the three days from Saturday night – the heaviest in 60 years – and by Wednesday it had reached the annual average, China’s National Meteorological Centre said.
On Tuesday, maximum precipitation reached 201.9mm (7.9 inches) per hour in Zhengzhou, breaking the previous record of 198.5mm in 1975. That compares to the highest hourly rainfall record in Hong Kong of 145.5mm in June 2008, when two people died in a heavy storm that triggered landslides.
The highest ever was in the US state of Missouri in 1947, which recorded 305mm of rain in an hour.
