Chinese Meteorological Agency Field Trip

Today we met our Qinghua colleagues for the first time! It was a great time to visit the Chinese Meteorological Agency and Wastewater Management Center with them! Even though it’s super cold as usual, Iir was such a nice sunny day. We can see the blue sky and sunshine.
In the morning, we visited the Chinese Meteorological Agency. One of the staff from the agency gave us a lecture that briefly introduced what is meteorology and How does CMA work. What is Meteorological observing? A meteorological observation is the scientific study of the atmosphere and its changes. It can help us to understand the questions like why there is rain. Climate, water, or land can all be the influential factors. Overall, meteorology is studying the earth as a complex system, and it mainly focuses on climate, weather and water. Observations are the key for meteorology. By making observations, we can make predictions, analysis, monitoring and models. In order to build up a precise climate model, it requires lots of observations, and people make the observations with the help of satellites , aircrafts or ships that carry instruments. You may ask why do we care about meteorology and create those models? It helps us to predict hazards such as extreme weathers, typhoon, and flood that can make tremendous damages on human lives. However, if we could observe or predict the hazards in advance, we could minimize the cost of damages. So we need to have more hazards warnings. Observing includes surface observing, upper air observing and radar observing. The surface observing is collecting data from the earth’s surface. There are both national and regional stations that make surface observations in China. The upper air level is using instruments such as air crafts or satellites to collect data. The radar observing is collecting data by using radars.
The next question is how does CMA work? It’s led by the central government, which means that they need to follow the central government’s policy and instructions. Under CMA, there are so many different departments such as National Climate Center, CMA Observing Meteorology Center, National meteorology Center, etc. The place we went to was the Observation Meteorology Center. The main focuses in the Observation Center are to make the observations and collect data. As I mentioned above, these observations are so valuable for making predictions about the potential natural disasters. They also make weather forecast for us which is really important and closely related to our daily life. Thanks to the weather forecasting, we can be prepared for the next day: will it be cold or warm ? Will it rain or snow? After the lecture, we went outside to see the instruments. There are so many cool instruments that collect data for predicting precipitation, wind, clouds, etc. For some of the instruments, you can see they’re surrounded by the fences. This is to precut them since the instruments are so sensitive. Overall, it was a really cool experience to learn about meteorology. (It’s such a complex study that involves so many different earth’s systems) and visit the observation center!