China's Current Floods 5th-Biggest Non-US Weather Disaster On Record; $22 Billion, 300+ Dead/Missing

A historic flood event continues in China, where torrential monsoon rains along the Yangtze River Valley in central and eastern China since early summer have killed 237 people, left 93 people missing, and caused at least $22 billion in damage, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters said on Thursday. According to the International Disaster database, EM-DAT, this would make the 2016 floods China's second most expensive weather-related natural disaster in history, and Earth's fifth most expensive non-U.S. weather-related disaster ever recorded. Only China's 1998 floods, with a price tag of $44 billion (2016 dollars), were more damaging than the 2016 floods. According to the June 2016 Catastrophe Report from insurance broker Aon Benfield, Earth's only deadlier weather disaster in 2016 was an April heat wave in India that claimed 300 lives. Some 147,200 houses have been destroyed by this summer's floods in China, and over 21,000 square miles of farmland had been inundated--an area the size of Massachusetts and Vermont combined. An additional $1.3 billion in flood damage from Typhoon Nepartak occurred in China in July.


Figure 1. A stadium in Wuhan, China on July 6, 2016, after the city received 7.09” (180 mm) of rain in the twelve hours ending at 8 am July 6. Wuhan received over 560 mm (1.8 feet) of rain over the ten day period before the July 6 deluge, causing widespread damage and chaos. (Photo by Wang He/Getty Images)


Figure 2. Flood waters inundate a village in Xuancheng, in east China's Anhui province, on July 7, 2016. Image credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images.

It's been a severe monsoon season in China this year. As we noted in a June 23 post, the heavy rains in China have occurred along the Mei-yu (or baiu) front, a semi-permanent feature extends from eastern China across Taiwan into the Pacific south of Japan, associated with the southwest monsoon that pushes northward each spring and summer. The Mei-yu rains typically affect Taiwan and southeastern China from mid-May to mid-June, then migrate northwards to the Yangtze River region and southern Japan during June and July (the Mei-yu is known as Baiu in Japan), and then further northward to northern China and Korea (known as Changma in Korea) during July and August. A number of studies have found that the Mei-yu rainfall tends to be particularly heavy in the summer following an El Niño event, as is occurring in 2016--and occurred in 1998, the only year to experience more damaging flooding in China.

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