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 (
evere spring to early summer drought over Southwest China (SWC) in 2019 caught the public by surprise with its extreme intensity and damage (Ding and Gao 2020; Lu et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2021). Having still not fully recovered from this event, SWC then encountered one of its worst droughts on record in spring to early summer 2020 (the March-June mean ranks 13th and June ranks first in dryness since records began in 1961). Compared to the 2019 drought, the 2020 drought was episodic, developed rapidly from March to April due to the exceptionally high temperature and low precipitation, was slightly alleviated by sporadic precipitation during late April and May, and strengthened again to the lowest precipitation and highest temperature on record in June. This severe 2020 drought, especially in June, has raised questions about anthropogenic drought influences because of its large-scale damage to the local ecology, agriculture, and economy.Usually a humid region, SWC has suffered more frequent and severe droughts in recent decades (Li et al. 2019;Yan et al. 2017; Ding and Gao 2020). According to previous research on SWC droughts, persistent abnormal sea surface temperature (SST) over the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans (Ju and Chen 2003; Liu et al.
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