World Cities Day brings October to an end on 31 October each year and was first celebrated in 2014. The theme of 2025 is People-Centred Smart Cities.

China's meteorological departments have consistently adhered to the people-centered concept, continuously enhancing meteorological monitoring, forecasting, and early warning capabilities to support the development of smart cities.

Beijing:

Beijing Municipal Meteorological Service has built a full-chain system of "comprehensive perception, precise forecasting, and smart services" based on digital technology. It enhances mountain area monitoring capabilities, has built 86 dual-redundancy high-standard weather stations, innovatively utilized city-wide communication towers to build 2372 tower-based weather stations, promoted multi-departmental sharing of data from 2062 rainfall stations, reducing the ground observation spacing across the city to 2.3 kilometers.

It has developed the weather forecast agent-"Lingxi" artificial intelligence (AI) Forecaster. This agent is based on a large language model, deeply integrates meteorological data such as local extreme weather theoretical knowledge bases, forecast products, refined real-time data, and forecaster experience. It enables intelligent analysis and information aggregation of multi-source, multi-modal meteorological data, supports natural language dialogue, analyzes the latest meteorological data in real-time, automatically retrieves historically similar major weather events, and can generate forecast service products containing weather phenomenon and element analysis, extreme weather characteristic description, forecast decision suggestions, and risk warning prompts, assisting forecasters in their work.

Shanghai:

Shanghai Meteorological Service has taken the lead in building Urban Multi-hazard Early Warning Toolbox, which is currently being piloted in 12 countries and regions.

It established a data screening list, aggregating 54 types of data elements from departments like water affairs, emergency management, and transportation, and built 6 types of digital twin application scenarios in the “One River, Two Banks”core area of Shanghai: urban rainstorm waterlogging, wind-induced falling objects, health meteorology, risk census, bridge risk, and high-altitude operation risk, and integrated with progressive service of risk prompts, risk warnings, and disaster early warnings and Complemented by a tailored response mechanism, it has achieved closed-loop management from early warning to resolution.

“One River, Two Banks” Aerial Work Weather Safety Index Scenario Source: Shanghai Meteorological Service

Chongqing:

Chongqing Municipal Meteorological Service has built the "Si Tian" digital-meteorology operational platform, consisting of 4 systems: “Tianshu” (Intelligent Coordinated Observing System), "Tianzi”(Intelligent Forecasting System), "Zhitian" (Smart Service System) ,"Yutian" (Smart Disaster Prevention System). Integrating data from over 30 departments including meteorology, emergency response, water resources, planning and natural resources, and forestry, it has built an integrated meteorology + big dataplatform, with real-time data processing speed reaching hundreds of millions of records per millisecond. 99 types of meteorological data and 25 service interfaces are embedded in the Digital Chongqing IRS, connecting "data channels" at all levels and supporting the development of 272 applications for Digital Chongqing.

"Zhitian"  Source: Chongqing Municipal Meteorological Service

Guangdong:

Focusing on key areas such as urban waterlogging, wind protection for construction sites, and low-altitude economy, Guangdong Provincial Meteorological Department has developed several core technologies. For example, Guangzhou built a "6-minute triggered" waterlogging warning system, dynamically issuing risk levels for 488 flood-prone points. After integrating into the "Sui Zhi Guan" city governance platform, drainage and emergency response efficiency nearly doubled, reducing losses for Guangzhou Automobile Group Co., Ltd. by 30 million yuan in 2024.

Fujian:

At its core driven by big data , Fujian Provincial Meteorological Service has utilized refined multi-source basic data information to build a smart meteorological service system, providing strong support for disaster prevention and reduction.

Sharing real-time fire risk meteorological data products with the Provincial Emergency Management Department, deeply embedding them into all aspects of forest fire prevention and fighting, effectively improving fire spot identification accuracy; using areal rainfall forecast products to provide precise scheduling support for over 20 large and medium-sized reservoirs across the province, helping increase power generation by over 100 million kWh in 2024, improving water energy utilization efficiency by 20%, and ensuring the successful reduction of 10 flood peaks.

Planner/Editor: JIANG Zhiqing