BEIJING: As a severe cold wave sweeps across China, the National Meteorological Center has issued a series of warnings, highlighting that the impact of strong winds, overshadowing the effects of snow and rain, is more pronounced compared to the previous cold wave. The center renewed a yellow warning, the third severest in the four-tier warning system, for strong winds on Friday morning, forecasting gusts of up to 32 meters per second in several regions, including parts of Northeast China, North China and the Yellow River-Huaihe River region such as provinces of Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shandong.
Powerful winds are also expected to hit some areas of the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea from 8 am Friday to 8 am Saturday. In Beijing, the wind intensity reached notable extremes from Thursday to Friday, with the maximum wind speed detected at a mountain observatory in Yanqing district reaching 40.2 meters per second, according to the municipal meteorological station. More than half of 311 monitoring stations in the capital recorded gusts with a speed of 19 meters per second or higher during the same period. Zhang Linna, chief forecaster at the Beijing meteorological station, said that this level of wind is unusual for early February as historical data show that the strongest gust recorded at the Beijing station was 21.9 meters per second on Feb 8, 1994. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
