Two years ago was the hottest on record, when the city sweltered under an annual mean temperature of 24.5 degrees Celsius (76.1 degrees Fahrenheit). The following year the mean was 0.1 degrees lower, making 2020 the second hottest on record. Mean temperatures between June and August that year hit a high of 29.6 degrees.

“It’s worrying because it really indicates that global warming is here,” he said. “We can’t say that in the next one to two years whether we will break the record, but at least we are seeing that the global warming effect will be there.”

There was also a record high 50 “hot nights” in 2020, when daily minimum temperatures reached 28 degrees or higher. The year also logged a new high of 47 “very hot days”, with daily maximum temperatures reaching 33 degrees or above.

The Observatory predicts the city’s annual typhoon season may start in June or earlier, and expects around five to eight tropical cyclones coming within 500km of Hong Kong.

While Cheng said the expected start of typhoon season was “not really abnormal”, and it was hard to predict the severity, he warned Hong Kong may see more severe storms as an “effect of global warming”.

“The mean temperature is on the rise, that means it can hold more water vapour and that water vapour is energy for tropical cyclones to develop,” he said.

“So, the general trend is that if this continues, there will be more energy for the tropical cyclone to develop. That means a tropical cyclone can develop into a very intense one.”

Annual rainfall was also predicted to be lower than expected this year, ranging between 2,000mm to 2,600mm. Last year’s annual total rainfall was 2,395mm.

To cater for members of ethnic minority communities in the city, the HKO will also provide weather information in eight languages from the second quarter of 2021.

They include Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia, Nepali, Urdu, Tagalog, Thai, Punjabi and Vietnamese.