A severe heatwave in parts of China exacerbated a drought and fuelled wildfires.
Extreme drought has caused water levels in China’s largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake, to drop by almost 10 metres between June and August.Many regions of China are just emerging from a record-breaking heatwave that lasted for two months, and which was followed by one of the worst droughts in nearly 40 years. Researchers are now trying to understand the conditions that fuelled such extreme events, because many projections came up short.
The severity of the heatwave and drought also highlights the importance of improving climate models and studying multiple extreme events together, to better assess their impacts. “Compounding events cause more disaster,” says Wang Aihui, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. For instance, the drought in the Yangtze River basin worsened quickly because of the combined effects of high temperature and a lack of rain.
These extreme trends were interspersed with out-of-season forest fires and regional pockets of heavy rains that caused flash flooding. “It was a very abnormal year,” says Fang Keyan, a climate scientist at Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, China.
The high also coincided with unusual behaviour of the westerly winds that blow around the globe in the mid-latitudes, which brought rain to northern China but mostly bypassed the south, says Wang Huijun, a climatologist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China.
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