30th October 2026 – (Hong Kong) Look at what people in Hong Kong are wearing in the last days of October. Office workers in Central have no jackets at all. Halloween costumes this weekend will be picked for how much sweat they can take, not how warm they keep you. On Threads, people say the city feels like Thailand and ask whether Hong Kong now has only one season. At home, plenty of people come in from the street and set the air conditioner to 16 degrees in a month when it used to be switched off.
At 6.45am on 21st October, the Observatory issued a Very Hot Weather Warning. It was the latest in the year one has ever been raised, beating the old record of 19th October, 2024. The headquarters in Tsim Sha Tsui reached 33.8 degrees and Yuen Long hit 36. Forecasters had warned that Frost’s Descent, the solar term that fell on October 23, could beat its hottest reading of 31 degrees, set in 2006. Sheung Shui was forecast to reach 35 degrees on October 26. Even now, with November close, the Observatory expects highs of around 30.
So why is October behaving like July? Professor Amos Tai of the Chinese University of Hong Kong gives three reasons in a SCMP article, and they are worth taking one at a time.The first is a passing visitor. Super Typhoon Champi never came near Hong Kong, but a storm affects a much wider area than its eye. Air rising inside a typhoon has to come down somewhere, and much of it came down over southern China. Sinking air warms as it descends, clears away cloud, calms the wind and blocks rain. That left Hong Kong under strong sun with nothing to cool it.
The second reason is bigger and lasts longer. A super El Niño formed in September. The Observatory says sea temperatures in the key monitoring zone of the Pacific between June and September ran higher than in any of the three previous super events, in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. The World Meteorological Organization puts the chance of it lasting through February 2027 close to 100 per cent, and expects it to peak around the end of this year. Closer to home, it has set up an unusual high-pressure pattern over the South China Sea and the Philippines, which holds back the clouds and storms that normally build there.
Autumn and winter arrive on the northeast monsoon, the cold dry wind that blows down from the continent. In most years it comes in October and the city exhales. This year the El Niño pattern has weakened it, so it reaches the coast tired and short of cold. The heat stays put and keeps building.
The third reason sits under the other two. Global warming has raised the baseline, so every typhoon and every El Niño now starts from a warmer floor. Since the 2000s, the number of Very Hot Days in Hong Kong has roughly quadrupled, from an average of 13.4 a year to more than 50 a year since 2020.
Now the harder question. Will Hong Kong end up with endless autumn, where winter and summer blur into one long mild season and the puffer jacket goes to the charity bin?
The evidence points somewhere else, and somewhere less comfortable. El Niño comes and goes every two to seven years. The cold air over Siberia still forms each winter and still pushes south. Cold surges will still come. The best warning against throwing out winter clothes comes from the last super El Niño. In January 2016, during a winter the forecasters had called warm, the Observatory recorded 3.1 degrees, the lowest in nearly six decades, and frost covered Tai Mo Shan. A warm winter on average can still have a few bitterly cold days.
Last year shows the other side. In October 2025, with a weak La Niña expected, which usually brings cooler weather, the city reached a low of 18.4 degrees and parts of the New Territories fell to 17. Yet the forecasts for the start of winter on November 7 still showed highs of 28 to 29 degrees. That was in a year that leaned cool. The baseline did that, not any typhoon or El Niño.
Put those together and a pattern appears. Hong Kong is not drifting toward a year of autumn. Summer is growing at both ends, starting earlier and ending later. Autumn and spring are being squeezed into a few weeks. Winter is shrinking into a handful of sharp cold snaps that arrive without much warning and leave just as fast. Tai expects this winter to be warmer than the historical record, and he says November could still bring very hot days.
That shape brings its own costs. Electricity bills stay at summer levels into November. Outdoor workers, delivery riders and older people living in subdivided flats get a longer stretch of heat stress with little relief. Homes and offices designed for a city with a real cool season now need cooling for most of the year. Much of the city’s routine still follows the calendar, from wardrobes to school sports days, when it should follow the thermometer.
The Lidong solar term will arrive on 7th November as it always does. The calendar says winter begins, and the air will probably say otherwise. Keep the puffer jacket, but move it to the back of the wardrobe. The summer clothes will be staying at the front a lot longer.
