China’s 2024 annual temperature hit a new high with serious floods

Climate is a major factor affecting economic and social outcomes. In China, the country’s National Climate Center releases an annual climate report that comprehensively covers China’s achievements and progress that year in climate monitoring and impact assessment. This series of reports has been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters  for seven consecutive years since 2019, and the “State of China’s climate in 2024” is now available.

 

The current report provides a summary of the main climate features and high-impact weather and climate events in China in 2024.

 

“The overall climate condition in 2024 over China was worse than normal, presenting a warm–wet climate with the highest annual mean temperature and second-highest number of hot days in history,” says the first author of the study, Jiang Yundi.

 

“The annual precipitation ranked as the fourth highest on record, with the anomalies in the central and eastern parts of China exhibiting a pattern of above-normal levels in the north while near-normal levels in the south”, Jiang adds.  

 

In 2024, China experienced severe rainstorms and flooding disasters. From 9 June to 2 July, the Yangtze River basin and regions south of the Yangtze witnessed the strongest rainstorm process since 1961. During the flood season, northern China saw frequent rainstorm events with highly overlapping affected areas. Intense rainfall caused a rapid transition from drought to flood in North China and other regions. From early July to mid-September, a historically extensive and prolonged heatwave persisted across central and eastern China, ranking as the second-longest such event on record. Autumn typhoon activity also displayed exceptional intensity, with Typhoon Yagi triggering significant impacts in Hainan, Guangdong, and Guangxi. In the late spring and early summer, meteorological droughts developed in stages across the Huang-Huai, Jiang-Huai, and North China regions.

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