Under the background of global warming, the severity, duration, and influencing scope of drought disasters in China are all increasing in recent years. Meteorological drought is a prerequisite for the occurrence of drought disasters. On the basis of clarifying the causes of meteorological droughts, it is of great scientific significance to improve the drought early warning ability, to propose drought disaster coping strategies and defense measures. This study comprehensively sorts out the research progress of the causes of meteorological drought in China. Firstly, in view of the regional differences in the drought formation causes in the various regions, the causes of drought are summarized respectively in Northwest China, North China, Northeast China, East China, South China, and Southwest China. Considering the time persistence of drought, based on the seasonal drought, two-season drought, and three-season drought, the main influencing factors on the formation of meteorological droughts with different durations in various regions are summarized respectively, from the aspects of cooling and warming flow transport, geopotential height field, and sea surface temperature field anomaly. Secondly, the scientific problems and future research directions on causes of meteorological drought are put forward. In previous studies, the analysis of drought causes mostly considered a single influencing factor, or considering the multiple influencing factors, but there is a lack of in-depth elaboration and research on the synergy between multiple factors. The contribution rate to drought formation and the quantitative relationship between these multiple influencing factors are urgent to study.

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.

Considering the different disaster-pregnant environment, population density and economic condition, the drought disaster chain models in southwest and south China were constructed respectively by using history data and record of references. Here, the disaster-pregnant environment includes climate background, underlying surface, landforms, soil and river network. And on this basis that the transmission characteristics of disaster on separate disaster chains were analyzed. The results show that the drought disaster chain structure is similar in southwest and south China, but their transfer process of disaster on the two chain is different. There are obvious regional characteristics of disaster transfer on their chain. The incipient drought can cause crop drought in southwest China, while moderate drought can cause crop drought in south China. In southwest China, the moderate drought can lead to some problems such as people and livestock drinking water difficult and livestock forage shortage, but these corresponding problems can be generated by the severe drought in south China. Being the difference in disaster-pregnant environment, the rock desertification phenomenon appears in southwest China under the severe drought condition, but the probability of rock desertification is small in south China except for north Guangxi. In the same region, as far as the various disaster-affected bodies are concerned, the threshold of drought degree transmitting is different. For example, shipping problems usually result from the moderate drought, and forest fire and pest disaster are often led by the severe drought, while soil degradations appear in the extreme drought.