Vilnius, Jan 2 (IANS): The year 2024 was the warmest in Lithuania since meteorological records began, the Lithuanian Hydrometeorological Service said on Thursday.

The average annual air temperature of 2024 in Lithuania was 9.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.1 degrees higher than the average multi-year (1991-2020) air temperature, the Baltic News Service (BNS) reported.

The warmest year so far was 2020 when the average annual air temperature in Lithuania was 9.2 degrees Celsius.

With global climate change, the five warmest years in Lithuania have been recorded in the last 10 years, Xinhua news agency reported.

In Lithuania, last year's spring was the warmest since modern records began in 1961, and the long-term air temperature record for Vilnius shows that it was the warmest spring in almost 250 years.

Scientists say that as the world continues to warm up, established climate patterns and water cycles are being disrupted, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe, according to the BNS.

Earlier in the day, China announced that the average temperature in the country in 2024 was the highest since 1961, when Beijing began compiling complete meteorological observation records.

China's National Climate Centre announced on Thursday that the national average reading in 2024 stood at 10.9 degrees Celsius, 1.01 degrees Celsius above the annual average, breaking the previous record set in 2023, which was 10.71 degrees Celsius.

A total of 19 provincial-level regions logged record-high temperatures last year -- including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Henan and Shaanxi, Xinhua news agency reported.

Average precipitation across the country reached 697.7 mm in 2024, 9 per cent more than the annual average.