Plateau city Lhasa records highest temperature in four decades

LHASA - Lhasa, capital of Southwest China's Tibet autonomous region, saw a temperature of 30.8 degrees Celsius on Monday, a record high since the city's meteorological data was first collected in 1981.

The reading was 0.4 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record, according to the regional meteorological bureau.

The bureau said Tibet had seen high temperatures and little rainfall since the beginning of June. The average temperature in the region in June was 10.7 degrees Celsius, 0.6 degrees higher than the average temperatures in previous years.

On Monday, the observatories in the counties of Gongkar and Gyaca, both under the jurisdiction of the city of Shannan, registered record-high temperatures of 31 and 32.6 degrees Celsius respectively.

The average precipitation in Tibet was down 30.5 percent compared with the same period in previous years, the lowest in the past decade, according to the bureau.