Drought is one of the natural disasters with the widest impact and the most serious economic losses in China, which directly threatens the country’s food security and socio-economic development. The understanding and research on drought will help to improve the national capacity of drought prevention and mitigation. Since 1949, China’s research on drought meteorology has achieved fruitful results. Based on the research results of the scientific research project group related to drought meteorology carried out by the Key Open Laboratory of Arid Climate Change and Disaster Reduction of China Meteorological Administration since the 21st century, through the achievement retrieval, this paper summarizes the new progress in drought monitoring technology, drought temporal and spatial distribution, drought disaster-causing characteristics, drought disaster risk and its response to climate warming, as well as drought disaster risk management and defense technology. At the same time, based on the frontier development trend of drought meteorology research, on the basis of strengthening the comprehensive drought observation test in drought prone areas under the background of climate change, this paper puts forward that China’s drought meteorology research in future should study quantitatively the formation mechanism of drought from different dimensions and scales, build a new comprehensive drought monitoring method of multi-source data fusion and multi-method combination, reveal the mechanism of drought disaster-causing and evaluate scientifically the drought disaster risk, putting forward the executable risk management strategies. This work is of positive significance to promoting drought meteorological research in China.

It is important to grasp the temporal change characteristics of water areas of main reservoirs in Gansu for the construction of comprehensive experimental zone of national ecological security barrier in Gansu Province. Based on the 8-day composited surface reflectance products of MODIS (MOD09) from 2000 to 2014, the water areas of Shuangta, Changma, Hongyashan and Liujiaxia reservoirs in Gansu were monitored by using water index of WI1, which was compared with the visual interpreted water areas of real-time satellite data from Lanzhou Regional Climate Center (LZRCC), and their relationship was established. And then the climatic change characteristics of water areas of the four reservoirs were analyzed. Results show that the water areas of the four reservoirs in Gansu retrieved by WI1 based on MOD09 data had better correlation with the real-time monitoring water areas from LZRCC, and their change trends were almost consistent, which indicated that MOD09 data were able to use the research on the climatic changes of reservoir water areas. The interannual change of water areas of the four reservoirs in Gansu was obvious, and the water areas were largest in spring or autumn, while it was smallest in summer. The annual change trends of water areas of the four reservoirs in different seasons were more complex over the last 10 years. Overall, the water areas of Changma and Shuangta reservoirs had no obvious change trend, while that of Hongyashan and Liujiaxia reservoirs in spring, summer and autumn increased volatility over the last 10 years, which was beneficial to agricultural irrigation in middle and western Gansu.