This winter, there have been many rare weather in China, such as: extreme heavy snowfall in the northeast, snowfall in the Taklamakan Desert. Judging from the pictures taken, the Taklamakan Desert has become a "snow desert", and the endless whiteness obscures the original color.
The Taklamakan Desert is located in the interior of Eurasia, far from the ocean, and surrounded by tall mountains, making it the end of the steam to reach here, so it is dry and rainy all year round, with an average annual rainfall of less than 50 mm.
On the other hand, the evaporation in the Taklamakan Desert region is as high as 2500-3400 mm, which is greater than the amount of rainfall, resulting in a drier and drier climate here, forming a desert landscape.
It is precisely because the average annual precipitation in the Taklamakan Desert is very small, so the snowfall in the desert is relatively rare. According to the observation data of the past years, since 1961, the weather station near the Taklamakan Desert has recorded 15 times of snowfall in winter, and in the process of these 15 snowfalls, most of the snowfall greater than 2 mm appears in the 10 years after 2010, that is, the frequency of winter snowfall on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert is increasing, so is this a good thing or a bad thing for human beings?
In fact, this year's Taklamakan Desert is not the first time that people have attracted attention because of precipitation, just in the summer, due to the local heavy rainfall and summer alpine ice and snow meltwater, the Taklamakan Desert also suddenly had a flood.
Flooding occurs in summer and snowfall occurs in winter. This seems to be a good thing for desert environments, because the most scarce thing in the desert is precipitation, and after precipitation, the local vegetation can be revived, and even the desert will become an oasis.
In fact, the increase in rainfall in the Taklamakan Desert is not necessarily a good thing, nor can it turn the desert into an oasis, first of all because the average annual evaporation in the desert area is large, and even if there is one or two extreme precipitations, the desert area cannot store water, and the vegetation is difficult to survive for a long time.
Secondly, the flood control capacity in arid areas is poor, many families in Xinjiang do not have umbrellas and raincoats, the waterproof capacity of houses is also limited, and occasionally one or two rains will bring greater impact to the local area, and even disaster events.
Moreover, climate change is a long-term process, and the occasional anomalous precipitation does not mean that the climatic conditions here will change greatly, but it will take more than a decade or even decades of research to know whether it is moving in the direction of warming and humidification.
In fact, experts are not optimistic about the rainfall in the Taklamakan Desert, because the study found that the reason for the increase in winter snowfall here is global warming, and the impact of global warming on humans is not as simple as desert snowfall.
The most direct impact of global warming is not the increase in temperature, but the frequency of extreme weather.
Scientists have found that for every 1 ° C increase in temperature, the water content in the air increases by 7%, and in the future, these water vapors will fall on the ground in the form of precipitation, which can easily trigger extreme rainstorms, and extreme rainstorms are a disaster for some areas with limited flood control capabilities. Since the summer of this year, extreme rainfall has occurred in many parts of Eurasia, and the lives of local people have been very affected.
On the other hand, global warming can also lead to extreme heat and drought in some areas, increasing the probability and severity of wildfires. For example, this summer, there was an abnormal high temperature in North America, which caused more than 600 deaths in North America, in addition to a number of forest fires in the local area, causing serious damage to the local environment.
Although global warming has led to a decrease in the number of winter cold waves moving south, the intensity of cold waves has increased. For example, this year, there was extreme snowfall in the northeast of China, and the amount of snowfall even broke the highest record since the record.
Although global warming sounds contradictory to cold waves, it is actually affected by global warming, and the northern hemisphere is more prone to extreme cold weather in winter.
This is because the stable westerly wind belt and the strong polar vortex will firmly bind the cold air from the polar regions to the polar regions, but under the influence of global warming, the temperature in the polar regions will increase significantly in winter and spring, and the temperature in the Arctic region will have a "polar amplification effect", and the average temperature in other places will increase by 1 ° C, and the temperature here will increase by 2 ° C, making the temperature gradient between the equator and the Arctic weakened, which is more conducive to the cold air going south and affecting most of the northern hemisphere.
The snowfall in Taklamakan this time is precisely because the cold wave goes south, the cold wave will bring many snowfalls in the northern region of Xinjiang in China, and some water vapor will continue to push south with the cold wave, forming snowfall in the Taklamakan Desert.
In recent years, extreme weather has occurred frequently, which has a great impact on people's lives. Scientists have warned that global warming is urgent, and if the Earth's temperature continues to rise, there may be more serious disasters in the future due to extreme weather, such as famine, rising ground levels, high temperature heat waves, etc.
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