China Witnesses Extreme Weather Conditions; Issues First National Drought Alert

Beijing: China is currently witnessing extreme weather conditions across the country, with some regions hit by record heat waves and drought while others facing flood-related disasters. Following this, China has issued its first national drought alert of the year.

China’s National Meteorological Center also renewed its high-temperature red alert on Friday, the 30th consecutive day it has issued alerts, it said on its Weibo channel. State forecasters now predicted that the current heatwave hitting China would only start to abate on August 26.

The national drought “yellow alert”, issued late on Thursday, comes after regions from Sichuan in the southwest to Shanghai in the Yangtze delta have experienced weeks of extreme heat, with government officials repeatedly citing global climate change as the cause.

The yellow alert is two notches short of the most serious warning on Beijing’s scale.

In one of the Yangtze’s important flood basins in central China’s Jiangxi province, the Poyang lake has now shrunk to a quarter of its normal size for this time of year, state news agency Xinhua reported.

As many as 66 rivers across 34 counties in the southwestern region of Chongqing have dried up, state broadcaster CCTV said on Friday.