The arid and semi-arid regions of western Northwest China (WNWC) are located at the Eurasian continent's hinterland and lie in the shadow of the Tibetan Plateau (Figure 1;
During summer 2020, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River (Middle and Lower Yangtze River Region (MLYR)) in the southern China suffered from unprecedented heavy Meiyu precipitation and catastrophic flooding (Wei et al., 2020). According to China's National Climate Center, 759.2 mm of rain fell this year, second only to the 789.3 mm recorded in 1954 and 1.2 times more than the average of the normal years (343.4 mm) (Ding et al., 2021). It is the highest recorded Meiyu precipitation since 1961, exceeding the same period in 1998. At the same time, the duration of 2020 Meiyu season was 62, 22 days longer than that of the normal (40 days), which is the longest since 1961, tied with 2015. The floods affected 63.46 million people and caused direct economic losses of 178.96 billion RMB. In that flood disaster, 54,000 houses collapsed and 219 people were killed or missing (
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