Technical Note

Dust storms in China decreased during the last 50 years

G. GUO*{ and G. XIE{{Nanyang Normal University, Henan, 4730161, P. R. China

{Institute of Geography Science and Natural Resource, Chinese Academy of Science,

Beijing, 100101, P. R. China

There are many deserts and dust storms in northwest China. Some researches

showed that the speed of desertification of China increased during the last 50

years. This should provide more source materials to dust storm, while in fact the

dust storm frequency decreased. Our analysis considered that this is partly due to

the global warming, especially the warm of Tibet Plateau which lead to the

decrease of Asia monsoon, and then lead to the dust storm frequency decrease.

China is a country with many dust storms; figure 1 (and on cover) shows a dust storm

in Gansu Province in north-west China on 25 February 2005. North-west China lies in

the inner part of the Asia-Europe continent, the climate is dry and there are many

winds and desert storms. With the rapid growth of local population, many grasslands

were assigned to crop and then they were devoured by quicksands. According to the

*Corresponding author. Email: gougm@igsnrr.ac.cn

Figure 1. Dust storm in west Gansu Province of China detected by Aqua/MODIS on 25February 2005. This image is composited with MODIS band 2 (R), band 1 (G) and band 3(B). It can be seen that the cloud is white, lake is blue, dust storm is yellow and land surface isdark brown.

International Journal of Remote Sensing

Vol. 29, No. 6, 20 March 2008, 1619–1620

International Journal of Remote SensingISSN 0143-1161 print/ISSN 1366-5901 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/01431160500196919

national report of desertification published in 1996, the total desertification area is

262.26104 km2, about 27.3% of the whole of China. Some researches showed that thespeed of desertification increased during the last 50 years: it was 1560 km2 per year in

the 1950s–1970s, 2100 km2 in the 1970s–1980s, and 2460 km2 in the 1980s–1990s (Dong

et al. 1999). This indicated that the land surface became worse and worse, and it

provided more and more source materials for dust storms.

People may think that there were more and more dust storms during the last 50

years, but it is not the truth. According to 681 Chinese weather stations’ records

from 1957–2000, the dust storm days per year decreased (see figure 2) (Zhou et al.

2002). This seems to contradict the increase of desertification. Our explanation isthat the monsoon decreased. It has been verified that the monsoon was closely

related with global warming. China has become warmer since the 1970s especially

the Tibet Plateau. The monsoon decreased with climate warming and this led to the

decrease of dust storms. At the same time the heating effect of the Tibet Plateau

decreased. According to 36 weather stations’ records in the Tibet Plateau during the

last 40 years, the daily minimum temperature and the maximum temperature both

increased, but the Tmin increased significantly with 0.30uC per 10 years while the

Tmax increased with 0.12uC (Du 2001), so the temperature difference decreased.This decrease leads to the decrease of the Asia monsoon. It becomes weak and

cannot enter further into inner Asia continent, thus north China becomes dry and

south China becomes rainy. This will aggravate the drought in north China and

flood in south China.

Here the monsoon plays an important role in dust storms, but we should not

neglect the importance of desertification. With the continuous drought, the

environment of north China will become increasingly worse. How to resolve the

contradiction between worse environment and increasing population becomes a bigproblem to researchers and government.

ReferencesDONG, G., WU, B. and CI, L., 1999, Present situation, cause and control way of desertification

in China. Journal of Desert Research, 19, pp. 318–332.

DU, J., 2001, Temperature change over the past 40 years on the Tibetan Plateau. Acta

Geographica Sinica, 56, pp. 683–692.

ZHOU, Z., WANG, X. and NIU, R., 2002, Climate characteristics of sandstorm in China in

recent 47 years. Journal of Applied Meteorological Science, 13, pp. 193–200.

Figure 2. Dust days per year of Beijing, Zhurihe, Hetian, Zhangye, Minqin and Xinghaiweather stations from 1954–2000; only one station increased.

1620 Dust storms in China have decreased