![]() The Chinese coast is home to important metropolises including Shanghai, the country’s most developed and richest city, as well as the port city of Tianjin and the tech hub of Shenzhen. “In the last 11 years, from 2012 to 2022, China’s coastal sea levels were the highest since observations were first recorded,” Wang said at the news conference, which released the latest annual report on China’s sea levels.Ībout 45% of China’s population of around 1.4 billion and more than half of the country’s economic output comes from coastal regions. The global mean sea level has risen 3.4 mm a year over the past three decades, according to NASA. ![]() The temperature of China’s coastal waters has increased significantly due to global warming, and the rise in sea levels has accelerated, said Wang Hua, head of the marine forecasting and monitoring department at the ministry.Ĭhina’s sea levels have increased by an average of 3.5 mm per year since 1980, and an average of 4.0 mm per year since 1993 – higher than the global rate over the same periods, Wang said. The swell was 10 mm higher than in 2021, when the previous record was reached. In 2022, China’s coastal sea levels were 94 millimeters (3.7 inch) higher than “normal,” defined as the average over the 1993-2011 period, making it the highest since records began in 1980, an official at the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday at a news conference. Caption by Adam Voiland, with image interpretation by Peter Norris, Shang-Ping Xie, Jim Coakley, and Robert Wood.Sea levels on China’s coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average and posing a serious threat to coastal cities such as the financial hub of Shanghai. NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response. “It’s an area for future research that requires in situ observations and would be a good topic for future field campaigns,” Xie noted in an email. According to Shang-Ping Xie, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Hawaii, MODIS images of sea fog in the Yellow Sea often show sharp edges, but the mechanism that causes them to form isn’t clear. The sharp western edge of the fog cloud is another compelling aspect of the image. About half of the collisions at the large Chinese port of Qingdao are caused by fog, according to statistics compiled by the Chinese government. Sea fog can pose a significant hazard to ships around the Yellow Sea, with low visibility leading to accidents. Generally the fog lasts about two days but once in 1977, an exceptionally long-lasting fog event spanned 10 days. (The water is cooler because sunlight warms it less quickly than the land surfaces surrounding it, and because ocean currents off the west coast of Korea tends to bring cold water to the surface).Īccording to research conducted by scientists at the Ocean University of China, the season for advection fog usually starts in early April and ends in August as a result of shifting regional wind patterns. In this case, northeasterly winds pushed a tongue of warm air out over the cooler Yellow Sea. This type of fog generally forms when warm, moist air is pushed by winds over a cooler surface. They found that it was likely advection fog. An aerosol plume, likely haze emanating from industrial areas in China, is also visible and has caused the lower half of the cloud to appear slightly grayer than the upper half.Ītmospheric scientists Peter Norris and Gary Partyka of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center simulated the meteorological conditions that might create such a cloud formation with the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS-5) model. ![]() These clouds form higher in the atmosphere than fog and do not affect visibility at the sea surface. Closer to the middle, the surface has a more textured appearance (see lower image), indicating possible convection and the possible presence of stratocumulus clouds. The fog is generally thickest along the edges, where the cloud surface appears quite smooth in the satellite image. The low-lying cloud formation covered an area roughly the size of the Korean Peninsula, stretching nearly 900 kilometers (400 miles) from Korea Bay to the Chinese city of Shanghai. One of those days was March 28, 2012, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image (top) of a fog bank hugging the Korean coast. The shallow sea, which has a number of busy ports, usually sees 50 foggy days a year some weather stations in the area have measured fog on up to 80 days. In spring, it’s not uncommon for a cloak of thick fog to cover the Yellow Sea.
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