It's early! Plum rain season set to begin tonight

DON'T leave home without your umbrella over the next month or so - the plum rain season is set to begin tonight or tomorrow, local forecasters said yesterday. This is 10 days earlier than previously predicted. The arrival of the plum rain belt will see showers and thunderstorms dominate the city's weather over the next 30 days, said the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau. While the plum rain season is set to start early, total precipitation should still be 170 to 210 millimeters as previously forecast, said Wu Rui, a chief service officer at the bureau. "The plum rain season is now less predictable," Wu told Shanghai Daily yesterday. "With global climate change, the plum rain season in recent years is different to that of the 1980s and 1990s." The plum rain season in Shanghai, which usually started around mid-June and ended around mid-July, should be continuously showery with few high-temperature days. However, in recent years showers and thundershowers have become more intermittent with high-temperature days occurring between rainy days. Temperatures are likely to reach 35 degrees Celsius today, the bureau said. The Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Center said air quality today is expected to be slightly polluted, the third level of the five-tier scale.

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