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If you remember winters in Hong Kong being much colder in the 1990s and 2000s – and you keep reminding people of the fact that December used to feel cold – it’s not just your imagination: winter in Hong Kong this year has indeed been warmer than usual.
In a newly published monthly weather summary, the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) confirmed that Hong Kong recently experienced its hottest winter ever since records began in 1884. Warmer-than-usual temperatures were charted in the past three months – December to February – causing Hong Kong to log a mean temperature of 19.3 degrees Celsius, which is two degrees Celsius above normal. Moreover, the maximum average temperature during that period was recorded as 21.9 degrees Celsius while the minimum average temperature was 17.3 degrees Celsius – the highest and the second-highest on record for Hong Kong winters, respectively. On top of that, only five days during that same three-month period were classified as ‘cold days’, one of the third-lowest on record. HKO defines a ‘cold day’ as any day that logs a temperature of under 12 degrees Celsius.
February 2026 was called out as being “unseasonably warm” with an average temperature of 20.1 degrees Celsius – that’s three degrees Celsius above the norm – which contributed to the overall results for Hong Kong’s warmest winter ever, as it was one of the second highest on record for the month. In comparison, just a year ago, February 2025 logged a monthly mean temperature of 17.3 degrees Celsius, which is close to the normal of 17.1 degrees Celsius. Oddly enough, February 2026 was also a wetter month than usual, thanks to a trough of low pressure on the last day of the month, causing a total monthly rainfall of 41.6 millimetres, which is seven percent above normal.
“Under the background of global warming, the mean temperatures over Hong Kong have shown a marked increasing trend in the past 30 years,” according to a blog post on HKO. Back in 2024, Hong Kong saw 11 months as warmer than usual, tracking only 11 ‘cold days’ total – 4.2 days fewer than normal from 1991 to 2020. In 2025, HKO recorded all 12 months to be warmer than usual with only six ‘cold days’ logged, and no Cold Weather Warning issued in all of November and December since the Cold Weather Warning System was introduced in 1999. It seems that things will only get hotter from here…
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