With the global warming, ENSO events and extreme climate events increasing, scientists from different countries are paying more attentions to research on precipitation reconstruction with high time resolution and long term drought events. They are aiming at understanding the climate variability, climate forcings, and impacts on social and economics.

During the recent two years, historical climate research group led by Professor Quansheng Ge, from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has achieved great breakthrough in precipitation reconstructions with high resolution. For example, the paper titled with Reconstruction of historical climate in China: High-resolution precipitation data from Qing Dynasty archives was published by the American Meteorological Society-- Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (impact factor: 3.728) in 2005, and the 3 reviewers all agree that this is a worthwhile work, and will contribute to the global climate change research and climate models improvements. In the same year, the annual precipitation series over the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River during 1736-2000 was also published in the journal of Science in China.

In 2006, this research group reconstructed the precipitation dataset for the period of 500-2000AD over the Eastern China, which was published in Terrestrial Atmospheric Ocean Science. To date, this dataset is the longest reconstructed series indicating the long-term precipitation variation in this region, it will provide important scientific basis for studies on the Eastern Asian summer monsoon, extreme events and precipitation over the large areas.

This historical climate research group has maintained uninterrupted work on this scientific area, and more papers, topic on Meiyu over the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River, the rainy season of North China and rainband movements of monsoon has been accepted and published recently on the journal of Chinese Sciences Bulletin and Climate Dynamics.

By Zhixin HAO, Research Center for Land Surface System