Northern China on alert for snow onslaught and record low temperatures
- The mercury is expected to stay below freezing as cold wave sweeps across the region from Wednesday
- Climatologist says the country’s winter average temperatures have risen but cold waves have also become more extreme
Northern China is bracing for fresh snowstorms this week, with the capital on alert for blizzards.
The National Meteorological Centre said on Tuesday morning that snowstorms would hit northern China from Wednesday to Friday as a cold wave swept across the country.
Minimum temperatures in parts of northern China “will approach or fall below the extremes of the same period in history”, the centre said.
A day earlier, the centre said temperatures in central and eastern China would continue to fall after mid-December.
It added that another round of cold snaps would keep temperatures below zero and “freezing all day” next week in much of the country’s north.
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Beijing issued a blue cold alert – the lowest in China’s four-tier warning system – on Tuesday afternoon, saying minimum temperatures in the capital would drop by more than 10 degrees Celsius between Friday and Saturday.
The city’s meteorological authorities also issued a third-level yellow warning for snowstorms. The city would have heavy snowfall from Wednesday morning to Friday, with some areas likely to experience severe blizzards.
Snow has been falling in some parts of northern China since Sunday, taking a toll on transport.
The main airport in Zhengzhou, Henan province, closed because of icy runways and a 40-vehicle pile-up on a highway in northern Shanxi province on Sunday left one dead and six injured.
The expected cold wave is the latest of a series of extreme weather events in northern China this year.
In June, several cities sweltered as they registered record numbers of days above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) for the month.
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Shao Sun, a climatologist at the University of California, Irvine, said the rising frequency of extreme events reflected growing instability in the climate system.
Sun said that China had experienced a noticeable increase in winter average temperatures as the planet had warmed but the “extremeness of cold waves has … strengthened in recent years”.
“The occurrence of severe cold waves is not contradictory to global warming,” Sun said, adding that the rapid warming of the Arctic Circle over the past three decades had weakened the polar vortex, making it easier for cold waves to move south.
Sun warned that northern China could be “most affected” by the December cold wave, bringing risks for agriculture, infrastructure, buildings and industries such as fishing and shipping.
Ma Jun, a leading Chinese environmentalist and founding director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, highlighted the threat extreme weather posed to building safety.
Late last month, at the opening of the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai, the World Meteorological Organization declared this year to be the hottest year in recorded human history, adding that the El Niño phenomenon could exacerbate high temperatures next year.
