The downpour finally arrived in Beijing this morning as promised, but failed to live up to predictions of becoming "the worst storm in six years."
The thunderstorm hit Beijing at around 6am this morning, causing flooding on some city streets. Residents are seen wading through above ankle-high water, but no major incidents have been reported.
According to the local weather authority, the Greater Beijing Area received an average of 65 millimeters of precipitation between noon on June 21 and 8am this morning, a two-day total that already exceeds the city's total precipitation for a six-month period.
But it's not over yet. A yellow alert for rain and a blue alert for lightning are still in effect for Beijing.
The current weather forecast says we will receive light to medium showers accompanied by lightning this afternoon along with a chance of hail. This evening will bring precipitation of 5-20 millimeters with some areas receiving thundershowers with heavier rain along with isolated cases of high winds and hail.
But even with more to come, experts are already forecasting that this year's precipitation will not surpass the storm of 2012 in which 77 Beijing residents died. With the storm failing to meet expectations after a protracted delay, some Chinese netizens have taken their anger out on the country's weather forecasters for their mistake.
The National Meteorological Center of China Meteorological Administration (NMCCMA) addressed the inaccuracy by comparing itself to an international peer.
"The NMCCMA has a forecast accuracy of 86.31 percent to predict whether it is going to rain or not, but the forecast accuracy for a rainstorm in the next few hours is only 21.8 percent. Though that number may sound ridiculously low, even in the USA, a country with advanced technologies, the number is only 27 percent," wrote the government agency on its Weibo account.
The NMCCMA called on the public to keep faith in authorities, reported the People's Daily.
Part of the public disappointment has to do with the prevalence of rumor-mongering on social media networks in advance of the storm. Although the NMCCMA attempted to debunk the rumors themselves, the Beijing Cyberspace Administration of China said it will crack down on the propagation of unauthorized weather forecasts.
Under Chinese law, neither private organizations nor individuals are allowed to issue meteorological forecasts.
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