Rain, heat warning for local students

SHANGHAI students who will appear for the national college entrance examination on July 7-9 have been warned that possible showers and thunderstorms will affect traffic.

The city’s weather forecaster is also warning that besides rain, temperatures are also likely to touch 30 and 31 degrees Celsius on Wednesday and Thursday.

The Shanghai Meteorological Bureau issued two alerts yesterday — yellow for lightning and blue for rainstorms at 10:30am and 11:50am — when downpours lashed the city. Suburban Baoshan, Chongming, Jiading, Songjiang and Minhang districts received most of the rain.

The bureau said it could rain “cats and dogs” today with the plum rain belt moving southeastward. The temperature will range between 24 and 27 degrees.

Skies will remain gray tomorrow with the high increasing to 29 degrees.

Wednesday will be cloudy to overcast with showers or thundershowers at times. The high will touch 30 degrees.

It will be the same on Thursday with temperature soaring to a high of 31 with the low at 25.

This pattern will continue over the weekend with the mercury keeping an upward trend to 34 degrees on July 12.

It will cool down on July 14. Since the flood season began on June 1, Shanghai has witnessed torrential rainfall seven times. The city’s southern and northern regions have received more rain than other areas.

The average temperature so far this flood season is 25.6 degrees, 1 degree higher than in the past. The highest temperature recorded at the benchmark Xujiahui weather station is 34.6 degrees, while the highest reading for the outskirts is 35.2 degrees in Qingpu District. Both occurred on June 12.

Xiaoshu, or slight heat, the 11th solar term on the Chinese calendar, falls today. In this period, temperatures will increase as a prelude to the solar term dashu, or great heat.

Nationwide, a wide swath of southern China braced for more seasonal rains and flooding yesterday that has already left more than 120 people dead or missing this year.