The Three Gorges Region (hereinafter referred to as TGR) of the Yangtze River basin is located in the hinterland of China, spanning from Jiangjin District of Chongqing City in the west to Yichang City of Hubei Province in the east. Geographically, it includes the Three Gorges Reservoir and its surrounding areas.
Interannual variations in climatic features in the TGR, especially changes in precipitation, have an important impact on the reservoir’s runoff, the dam’s power generation, and the ecological environment around the reservoir. Therefore, it is crucial to know and understand the basic climatic characteristics of the main weather and climate events in the TGR each year in the long term.
The National Climate Center (hereafter referred to as NCC) of the China Meteorological Administration has compiled a series of annual climate reports focused on the TGR of the Yangtze River since 1996. These mostly unreleased reports aim to provide information on climate monitoring and meteorological disasters by analyzing a range of observed data.
Recently, the NCC team led by Professor Xianyan CHEN wrote a report that provides a detailed description of the major meteorological variables and their anomalies, as well as the main weather and climate events, in the TGR in 2020. The report, which, similar to those for 2018 and 2019 has been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, also analyzes the possible leading causes of the severe rainstorm and flood events that occurred in the summer of that year.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: Downstream channel of the Three Gorges Dam (Credit: Tong CUI)