Severe weather events to increase inc China

[DocMartin Williams]

Some places mentioning China in latest IPCC report, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Found using simple keyword search for China; not so many mentions of weather trends as I'd expected:

Quote:

Available global and regional studies of hydrological drought (Hirabayashi et al., 2008b; Feyen and Dankers, 2009) project a higher likelihood of hydrological drought by the end of this century, with a substantial increase in the number of drought days (defined as streamflow below a specific threshold) during the last 30 years of the 21st century over North and South America, central and southern Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia from Indochina to southern China, and central and western Australia. Some regions, including eastern Europe to central Eurasia, inland China, and northern North America, project increases in drought. In contrast, wide areas over eastern Russia project a decrease in drought days. At least in Europe, hydrological drought is primarily projected to occur in the frost-free season.

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A study based on simulations from two climate models also suggests increased desertification in arid and semi-arid China, especially in the second half of the 21st century (X.M. Wang et al., 2009). However, confident projected changes in wind are lacking (see Section 3.3.3).

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[tropical cyclones:] For the period from 1983 to 2006, the direct economic losses in China increased, but there is no trend if the losses are normalized by annual total GDP and GDP per capita, suggesting Chinese economic development contributed to the upward trend. This hypothesis is consistent with data on tropical cyclone casualties, which showed no significant trend over the 24 years (Zhang et al., 2009). Similarly, normalized losses from typhoons on the Indian southeast coast since 1977 show no increases (Raghavan and Rajesh, 2003).

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With the exception of the robust declines in wind reported over China, studies in most areas are too few in number to draw robust conclusions on wind speed change and even fewer studies have addressed extreme wind change.

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Both statistically significant increases and decreases in extreme precipitation have been found in China over the period 1951-2000 (Zhai et al., 2005) and 1978-2002 (Yao et al., 2008).

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Overall, these studies [inc China] are consistent with the assessment of an increase in warm days and nights and a reduction in cold days and nights on the global basis,

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Ding et al. (2010) reported increasing numbers of heat waves over most of China for the 1961-2007 period.

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The low-latitude (south of 45°N) decrease was also noted by Zou et al. (2006), who reported a decrease in the number of severe storms for mainland China based on an analysis of extremes of observed 6-hourly pressure tendencies over the last 50 years.

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