Climatological Characteristics of Meso-scale and Micro-scale Strong Convective Weather Events in China

Meso-scale and micro-scale strong convective weather events usually contain a great destructive power. Understanding climatological characteristics of strong convective weather events is of great importance for forecast, prediction and impact assessment of convective weather. In this paper, a newly developed dataset of meso-scale and micro-scale strong convective weather events in China that includes observations at 2332 national weather stations for the period of 1961-2015 is used to reanalyze the climatological characteristics of strong convective weather events (thunderstorms, lightnings, hails) on annual, seasonal, and monthly scales in China. The results show that the occurrence frequencies of thunderstorm, lightning, and hail are 39.23 d/a, 20.56 d/a, and 1.07 d/a, respectively. Thunderstorms and lightnings mainly occur in the summer, while most of the thunderstorms occur in July and most of lightnings occur in August. Hails mainly occurr between May and September, and the highest frequency occurs in June. Areas with high frequency of thunderstorms are similar to those with high frequency of lightnings, which are mainly located in southern and southwestern China and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The occurrence frequency of hail is closely related to topography, and areas with high frequency of hail are mainly distributed in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the eastern part of Inner Mongolia and the mountainous areas of central and western China, while the southeastern coastal areas have lower frequency than other areas. In addition, hail and thunderstorm increase significantly with elevation, especially hail, and the increase rates are 2.87 d/500 m and 1.80 d/500 m, respectively. It is found that elevation has important influences on the formation and development of these two types of strong convective weather.