As a key project for the governance and protection of the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Hydropower Complex Project is the world’s largest water conservancy and hydropower project, providing numerous benefits.
As a key project for the governance and protection of the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Hydropower Complex Project is the world’s largest water conservancy and hydropower project, providing numerous benefits. In recent years, due to global warming, extreme climate events such as extreme precipitation, high temperatures and regional drought have occurred frequently, and these events themselves, as well as associated geological disasters, represent a challenge to the safe operation of the Three Gorges Project. Therefore, it’s important to keep monitoring climate anomalies and extreme events with high impacts.
In a paper recently published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, Professor Xianyan Chen and her team from the National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, analyzed the interannual variations in major meteorological variables during the year 2021, with a focus on the climate anomalies and high-impact extremes that occurred in the Three Gorges region (TGR). In this report, the causes of the abnormal high-temperature weather in early autumn, which were not included in previous annual reports (Zou et al. 2020; Chen et al. 2021; Cui et al. 2022), were briefly explained.
“Climate extremes are one of the most important natural factors affecting the safe operation of the Three Gorges Project. We have achieved the goal of 175-m full storage in each of the previous 12 years. On the one hand, it shows that the utilization efficiency of water resources in China has been improved. On the other hand, we are able to provide more refined services for decision-making due to the great contributions made by scientists toward understanding the mechanisms of climate extremes,” says Prof. Chen.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: On 7 November 2021, the temperature in the scenic spot of Hongchiba, Wuxi County, Chongqing City, dropped to −5℃ following snowfall (Credit: Qiang Zhang)
