Under the severe situation of global warming, regional high temperature and drought events are becoming more frequent, posing a major threat to ecological environment, food security, economic development and life and health. From April to June 2024, high-temperature and drought events occurred again in North China, Northwest China, and Southwest China, causing significant losses in agricultural production. This study utilized various data to preliminarily analyze the characteristics and causes of the high-temperature and drought processes in above three regions. The results show that the drought in southwest China mainly occurred in April, while the drought in North China and Northwest China began to emerge in April, with the intensity gradually increasing and the range expanding from May to June. With the intensification of drought, the abnormal range of regional maximum temperature expanded significantly. The number of hot days in Northwest China reached a new record, and the highest temperature anomaly reached its peak in May, which was one month ahead of the most severe drought period (June) in this region. The high temperatures in southwest China and North China were close to historical extremes. Further analysis indicates that the drought in North China is mainly influenced by the circulation in the Pacific region, while high temperatures are mainly affected by the circulation in the low-latitude Pacific and the Western Pacific Warm Pool. The drought in Northwest China is mainly influenced by the Western Pacific Subtropical High and the Arctic Vortex in the Northern Hemisphere, and the main influence on high temperatures comes from the North Atlantic. The factors affecting high temperatures and drought in the Southwest China are more complex, but mainly concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere Subtropical High and the low-latitude Pacific and Indian Oceans. From the perspective of circulation and water vapor, the main causes of the drought in North China and Northwest China are the development and maintenance of the continental high pressure, while the drought process in Southwest China is affected by the northward shift of the Western Pacific Subtropical High, which allows the dry and hot air currents from the Indian subcontinent to control this area, leading to water vapor divergence and ultimately causing high-temperature drought.

The summer monsoon transition zone in China is one of the regions with strong land-atmosphere interaction in the world, and it is also an area where extreme weather disasters are frequent and easy to cause serious economic losses. Further understanding of land-atmosphere interaction in the transition area will help to improve the disaster prevention and mitigation ability of this region. Based on the research results of the summer monsoon transition area related projects carried out by the Key Laboratory of Drought Climate Change and Disaster Reduction of China Meteorological Administration in recent years, this paper systematically summarizes the new progresses of land-atmosphere interaction in the summer monsoon transition zone, including the spatio-temporal distribution law of land-atmosphere interaction in the transition region, the new characteristics of the response of land surface water budget to summer monsoon, the spatio-temporal variation characteristics and development mechanism of the boundary layer, the influence of monsoon and land-atmosphere interaction on regional climate in the transition zone, the new progress of land-atmosphere interaction on crop yield in the transition zone and new schemes for parameterization of multi-factor and multi-scale kinetic roughness. According to the development trend of land-atmosphere interaction research in the summer monsoon transition zone, it is proposed that the multi-scale dynamic response of land-atmosphere interaction to summer monsoon should be explored in the future, and the climatic dynamic relationship between surface processes and key physical quantities in the atmospheric boundary layer should be established on the basis of the research on the response rule of land-atmosphere exchange multi-cycle process to the annual cycle of summer monsoon in order to improve and enhance the simulation of regional climate models in the future. This work is of great significance to promote the research of land-atmosphere coupling process in China, which can provide scientific and technological support for disaster prevention and mitigation in the summer monsoon transition zone in China.

The northwest region of China is located in the hinterland of Eurasia, in which the source of water vapor is scarce, and drought is its main climatic feature. In recent years, with the continuous increase of regional precipitation, the warming and wetting in Northwest China has attracted great attention from all walks of life. In order to scientifically respond to social concerns, the team used multi-source data to conduct in-depth research on the phenomenon of warming and wetting in Northwest China from multi-scale and multi-dimensional perspectives, and found that the trend of wetting in Northwest China had significant and nonlinear enhancement characteristics. It is recognized that the wetting in Northwest China is expanding eastward, and the land surface evapotranspiration there has a special negative feedback mechanism on climate warming. It is estimated that the warming and wetting trend will still maintain in Northwest China in this century, and the wetting trend is driven by multi-factor comprehensive driving mechanism. The multi-aspect impacts of the warming and wetting in Northwest China are evaluated, and the technical countermeasures to deal with the warming and wetting there are put forward, and the research results of “the enhancement and eastward expansion of climate warming and humidification, formation mechanism and important environmental impacts in Northwest China” are formed. The major consultation report based on the research results has played an important decision-making support for the national strategies such as the development of the western region in the new era and the ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin. The research results were selected as “China's Top Ten Scientific and Technological Progress in Ecological Environment” in 2022, and have also received extensive attention from the international academic communities.

Drought is a major meteorological disaster with the highest frequency, the longest duration and the widest scope of harm in the world today, which has a huge and extensive impact on agriculture, ecology, social development and national economy all over the world. The drought is an important factor affecting agricultural production which determines the stability of crop production, further relates to the national food security. China is a large agricultural country, and also is a country with frequent drought disaster. Therefore, to improve the monitoring, forecasting and warning level of agricultural drought disaster, it is necessary to deeply understand its formation, influence characteristics, drought intensity, severity and physiological process and mechanism of crop victimization. It is also an important scientific problem to reduce and prevent drought disaster losses and improve national food security production. This paper comprehensively reviews the recent internal and overseas research progress of agricultural drought with different degrees and its impact on crop production, and explores the influence characteristics and mechanism of drought from the aspects of crop morphology, physiology, cellular and molecular levels, etc. The main indicators, indexes, methods and early warning systems in current agricultural drought monitoring are reviewed around food production to cope effectively agriculture drought. According to the new characteristics of agricultural sustainable development and drought, the current situation of drought disaster prevention and mitigation and agricultural drought coping are discussed. A series of drought coping measures both adaptation and mitigation are emphasized. On this basis, combining with the needs of national, regional and industrial development, the paper puts forward the important scientific problems, research countermeasures and the prospect of discipline development which should be emphasized in the future.

Drought is one of the natural disasters with the widest global impact. The anomalous drought and heatwave event that occurred in the Yangtze River Basin in summer of 2022 is not only of high intensity but also of long duration, it is a rare and significant drought event leading to very serious socioeconomic impacts in China. In view of the extreme nature of this event, this paper reveals the possible influence of atmospheric circulation and external forcing anomalies on this drought event based on an objective analysis of the evolutionary characteristics of this event. It is found that the meteorological drought index and soil moisture monitoring results consistently indicate that this drought event started to appear in June, developed rapidly in July, and further expanded and intensified in both extent and intensity in August. At the same time, the overall temperature in the basin was high, with the number of high temperature days exceeding 40 days in some areas. In addition, anomaly of evapotranspiration over the basin in summer was the second highest on record since 1960, second only to the high temperature drought event in 2013, which further exacerbated the degree of water deficit in the Yangtze River Basin. From the perspective of circulation characteristics, the abnormal intensifying and westward extension of the western Pacific subtropical high pressure, the small area and weak strength of the polar vortex and the intensifying and eastward shift of the South Asian high pressure in summer jointly led to weak water vapor transport conditions and prevailing sinking air currents in the Yangtze River Basin, making the overall conditions unfavorable for the occurrence of precipitation. The persistence of the La Niña event, the appearance of negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the persistence of the negative snow cover anomaly in the northwestern Tibet Plateau in spring may be the main external forcing factors leading to the circulation anomaly in this summer.

Based on the SRTM (shuttle radar topography mission)data, the ground clutter and other clutters around Tianshui radar station were filtered, then the Z-I function with localized parameters was established on the basis of six precipitation processes with three types in Southeast Gansu after filtering the ground clutter and other clutters of radar data, and at last the reflectivity factor of Xifeng new generation weather radar in Qingyang was compared with the one in Tianshui within the coincidence range. The results show that SRTM data can well simulate the distribution of ground clutter; radar reflectivity is ahead of precipitation; the Z-I function with localized parameters in Tianshui, which had a smaller A and bigger b, is significantly different to common ones; Tianshui new generation weather radar may have a systematic problem of low echo intensity.