Beijing May See Coldest Temperature of 21st Century Tonight

Here at the Beijinger we aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions, which is why last week our journalistic instincts led us to wonder: Freeze your t*ts off on Tuesday? Well, this week we feel it is incumbent upon us to investigate another pressing issue: Freeze your b*lls off today? Because damn Beijing, it’s cold! So cold in fact that we’re poised to see the coldest temperatures of the 21st century between now and tomorrow.

In case you’ve been too scared to look at your own weather app for fear that your eyes might freeze over, let us clue you in to just how frigid it is out there. The high today was a brisk -11°C with lows dipping to -17°C tonight, before hitting -18°C around 1-2am tomorrow morning. By the time you wake up, however, bust out those t-shirts as temperatures will be shooting up to a refreshing high of -6°C and a not-as-bad-as-negative-18 -13°C (just kidding, please do not wear a t-shirt tomorrow).

According to the official Weibo account of news site Guangmingwang, the coldest day of the last 20 years occurred in 2000 when temperatures hit -17°C, meaning tonight we’ll set a new record by one bone-chilling degree. Yay! Not to mention, at the time of writing those north-northwest winds were sweeping across the city at 22mph, effectively lowering the “feels like” temperature to -21°C. If you’re curious to know what the “feels like” temperature reaches when the new record is expected to be set around 1.30am tomorrow morning, that’s what citizen journalism is for and we applaud your intrepid-spirit.

For a while, the record stood at -15.2°C, which occurred in 1985. Roughly 30 years later, in 2012, following five straight days of -9°C temperatures, Beijing was expected to beat that record, however, according to the archives of timeanddate.com, it was not to be. Then again, in 2016, folks were bracing for a record-shattering -17°C, however, that too never came to pass. All of which is to say, we will be very interested to see if tonight/tomorrow morning does in fact result in a new record.

While this story is doubtlessly miserable, we can at least find solace in the fact that we don’t live at the Beijing Foyeding meteorological observatory in Yanqing, the capital's highest weather observatory, where last Tuesday saw temperatures drop to a ridiculous -26°C, Beijing’s lowest December temperature since the observatory began operations in 1978. Small victories, people.

READ: Freezing Temperatures, Howling Winds Prompt Beijing Cold Weather Warning

Images: ABC News