Research into weather and climate extremes have become extremely urgent in Asia due to a grave threat from frequent meteorological disasters in the past decade.

At an international workshop held by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which closed on Thursday, meteorologists from Asian nations, including China, Japan, India and Thailand, reported progress in extreme weather and climate events researches in their own countries.

Experts agreed that a marked gap existed between Asia's general research level in this field and that of other regions, especially developed countries.

According to statistics from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), about 43 percent of the natural disasters which occurred between 1991 and 2000 took place in Asia, and had a deadly effect on the globe's most populous continent.

From 1999 to 2000, Asia reported 2,035 climatic disasters, causing losses worth US$40.35 billion. Floods and storms occurred most frequently in Asia.

Zhang Guocai, general director of the National Meteorological Center (NMC) of China, said that the particular terrain in Asia with the Pacific Ocean to the east and land mass to the west created a typical monsoon climate.

Since monsoon abnormality was closely linked to weather and climate extremes, Zhang noted, unstable monsoon weather made climatic hazards more likely to occur in Asia than in other continents.

Currently, all Asian countries have started studying extreme weather events involving both temperature and rainfall data.

However, research levels and results vary a great deal in different Asian areas, since the number of observation stations and the period of keeping records in each country differ.

Ding Yihui, an expert with the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), acknowledged that the lengths of records in most Asian countries, except a small number of countries like India and Japan, are not long enough to detect changing trends over the decades in weather and climate extremes.

As an effort to enhance extreme weather research, Asian nations should further improve their comparisons of meteorological model results as well as boost cooperation with other regions in terms of data and software exchange, Ding said.

(Xinhua News Agency June 15, 2002)