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)