South Korea’s rainy season is historically several summer weeks when rain can fall in sheets at a moment’s notice. But these days, Choi Moon-hee doesn’t bother carrying an umbrella around Seoul anymore, even during the official monsoon season.
On Tuesday evening, she lost her bet, getting caught in a shower after days without rain. It was the first downpour she had experienced since forecasters declared the start of the monsoon two weeks ago.
“In the past, if it started raining, it would last for about a half-month, and we’d use our umbrellas often,” said Ms. Choi, 43, while taking cover under the awning of a building. “Nowadays, it often doesn’t rain even when the forecast says it will.”
In the south of the country, forecasters already declared the rainy season to be over last week. In western Japan, it was declared over in late June, the earliest point since records began.
East Asia’s rainy season has traditionally run from the middle of June into July, when a stationary weather front brings prolonged rainfall to the region. But the annual rains have become less predictable since the late 1990s, and scientists say that climate change is a major factor in that shift.
Climate change, which has worsened extreme weather around the world, has also made the monsoon season more inconsistent in India and China, catching billions of people off guard with floods and droughts.
In 2009, South Korea’s Meteorological Administration stopped forecasting when the season would begin and end, said Yeh Sang-wook, a professor of climate dynamics at Hanyang University in Seoul. “The traditional patterns have been broken, making forecasts of rainy seasons meaningless,” he added.
Ahead of this year’s monsoon season, forecasters warned of torrential rains, but they haven’t arrived in much of South Korea and Japan, causing people to adjust.
The scarcity of rain has coincided with a heat wave. On Tuesday temperatures hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Seoul, the highest recorded in the city in early July since 1908. On Wednesday, the country was under a heat warning for the third straight day.
Japan recorded its hottest June since record-keeping started in 1898, and a heat stroke alert was active in many regions this week. The authorities said that more than 10,000 people were hospitalized last week with heat-related illnesses.
“This summer could be record hot, and I hope people will continue to take measures to prevent heatstroke,” Yoshinori Oikawa, an official at the Japan Meteorological Agency, told reporters last week, noting the heat wave’s early arrival and intensity.
Temperatures in eastern China, Japan and South Korea hovered in the 90s on Wednesday.
Residents and officials are adapting. Tokyo offset water bills in the hopes that residents would use the money to run their air conditioning. Farmers in western Japan irrigated their pears ahead of the harvest. The heat and lack of rain threatened crops like cabbage and rice, which is already in short supply.
Officials in South Korea were anticipating both drought and flooding that could be brought on by a sudden downpour. Because of the heat, meteorologists are urging residents to drink water and stay indoors.
Farmers are struggling on Jeju, an island in southern South Korea where a significant portion of some of the country’s crops is grown. The dryness could require farmers to delay sowing carrot seeds. Citrus fruits, which the island is known for, have fallen prematurely because of the heat, and watermelons have been damaged by the sun. Meteorologists said that the rainy season there was the shortest since 1973, lasting just 15 days.
“It’s a little weird,” said Heo Young-gil, the director of agricultural disaster response at Jeju’s Agricultural Research and Extension Services. “It’s supposed to rain during rainy season, but it’s barely rained.”
Damage from the weather has also been unpredictable in recent years. In 2022, record rainfall flooded the wealthy Seoul district of Gangnam and killed at least nine people. It came in August, after that year’s rainy season was declared over. The following year was particularly dangerous, as flooding caused by monsoon rains killed dozens of people around the country in 2023.
“It could rain all at once in late July or August,” said Woo Jin-kyu, an official with the Korea Meteorological Administration. He emphasized that the rainy season had not been declared over in central South Korea, which includes Seoul.
With the rainless heat forecast to continue at least until the weekend in the city, in the midday heat on Wednesday, pedestrians held battery powered fans to their faces and carried their umbrellas to protect against the sun.
Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.