Flood and drought disasters and water resource management in Xinjiang

Abstract

Xinjiang located in the center of Eurasia and is far away from oceans. It features arid and semiarid continental climate, large area and complex terrestrial. The ecological system in Xinjiang is very fragile and changeable. Water resource management is critical to the development of local economy, especially to agriculture and livestock. Droughts occurred frequently in Xinjiang. On the other hand, mountains floods erupted in some years. In these years, snow melted rapidly because of mountains precipitation increasing abnormly and temperature getting higher. In these cases, mountains floods occurred easily. We have some experiences on forecasting these kinds of floods, for example, if 24h accumulated precipitation exceeds 25mm within 200km in mountains area, floods may happen. Another interesting fact is that we monitored through satellite images that there are heavy precipitations in the center of Tarim basin, this is very important to local water resource management. So accurate predictions of drought and flood disasters are very important to water resource management. This paper reports some research results of rules of drought and flood occurring and some forecasting methods