Abstract
The 24th Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will take place in Beijing in 2022. All three competition zones are vulnerable to extreme cold surges (ECSs), owing to the occurrence of the East Asian winter monsoon. In this paper, a representative competition domain (37.5–42.5° N, 110–120° E) is adopted, with a view to avoiding the differences in both the geographies and the thresholds of ECSs among different zones by considering the probability of simultaneous occurrences. Since 2009, the ECSs in the domain have displayed higher frequency and extremity. Based on all ECS cases in the domain, the dominant circulation is revealed by a quasi “reverse-Ω” pattern, with two strong ridges over the east of the Ural Mountain and the Okhotsk Sea, and a broad, deep trough in East Asia. The influencing sources of the ECSs at the domain could be traced to the Novaya Zemlya by a day-by-day backward analysis. The oblique latitude/longitude–time profiles of both the 500 hPa geopotential height and the 850 hPa air temperature anomalies from the source to the domain clearly indicate that the pre-signal could have a leading influence that exceeds ten days, with a slow accumulation in the first stage and a rapid outburst in the second stage.
Highlights
Extreme cold surges (ECS) are one of the most severe meteorological disasters in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in the winter season. Both statistical results and individual cases have explored that their frequency has been higher in recent decades than that in the first ten years of the 21st century in Eurasia and North America, owing to the Arctic warming or Arctic amplification, a phenomenon caused by the abrupt decrease in Arctic sea ice [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
The negative geopotential height height (GPH) anomaly center is situated in th eastern sector of East Asia, with minimum values less than −120 gpm
In contrast to the GPHs, the negative center with a normalization below −1.4 is located in the lower troposphere between 1000 and 850 hPa. This distribution indicates that the circulation causing a sharp temperature drop is a deep system that appears in the mid–low troposphere; the most significant signals exist at lower levels. Based on this distribution and the synoptic analysis of the operational weather forecast, we focus on the 850 hPa temperatures and 500 hPa GPH
Summary
Extreme cold surges (ECS) are one of the most severe meteorological disasters in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in the winter season Both statistical results and individual cases have explored that their frequency has been higher in recent decades than that in the first ten years of the 21st century in Eurasia and North America, owing to the Arctic warming or Arctic amplification, a phenomenon caused by the abrupt decrease in Arctic sea ice [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Owing to the influence of the EAWM, the three competition zones of BJ2022 (Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou) are all vulnerable to the extreme cold Negative impacts on both the economy and public health from the ECSs indicate the importance of a forecast with a more advanced leading time, especially one which is longer than a week.
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