About Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration

Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration

The Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration — UIDM, also rendered Institute of Desert Meteorology — is one of the eight specialised research institutes of the China Meteorological Administration, based in Urumqi, Xinjiang, at 46 Jianguo Road, Urumqi 830002 in the addresses printed on its papers. According to the CMA, UIDM has professional advantages and regional features in desert atmosphere, land-air interaction, hydrothermal circulation, agricultural and livestock meteorology, tree ring-based climate research, the application of satellite remote sensing technologies, and weather forecast research. Its setting explains the brief: Xinjiang contains the Taklimakan, China's largest desert, the Tianshan mountain range and some of the most arid inhabited landscapes in Asia. UIDM is the CMA's institute for the meteorology of those drylands, and its twin flagships — a desert field experiment station in the Taklimakan and a tree-ring laboratory reconstructing centuries of Tianshan climate — give it an identity unlike any other institute in the system.

Place in the CMA system

The CMA counts UIDM among its nine national meteorological research institutions, the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences plus eight specialised institutes, which pursue scientific and technological innovation in meteorology. The CMA's research pages name the Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology alongside the urban, typhoon, tropical-marine, plateau, atmospheric-environment, heavy-rain and arid-meteorology institutes. The distinction between UIDM and the Lanzhou Institute of Arid Meteorology is one of emphasis visible in their outputs: Lanzhou works on arid climate change and disaster reduction across the northwest, while Urumqi's published record concentrates on the desert atmosphere itself — the Taklimakan's boundary layer, dust and sandstorm processes — and on the tree-ring archives of the Tianshan. UIDM also serves as a regional institution for Xinjiang, a vast autonomous region whose agriculture, transport and settlement all operate under desert-edge conditions.

The Taklimakan desert meteorology station

The institute's field presence appears in its papers as the Taklimakan Desert Meteorology Field Experiment Station of CMA and the National Observation and Research Station of Desert Meteorology, Taklimakan Desert of Xinjiang, linked with the Xinjiang Key Laboratory of Desert Meteorology and Sandstorm. A national observation and research station inside China's largest sand desert is a serious piece of infrastructure: desert boundary layers behave differently from those anywhere else, with extreme surface heating, deep daytime mixing and dust lifting that feeds sandstorms travelling across northern China. Long-term instrumented observation from within the Taklimakan gives UIDM data that cannot be obtained from the desert's rim. The station's affiliation appears, for example, on the institute's work on how the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 changed winter and summer urban air conditions in Urumqi, where the desert-meteorology groups joined colleagues from the Xinjiang Meteorological Bureau's newsroom and aerosol-cloud-precipitation specialists to analyse an accidental atmospheric experiment.

Tree rings: the Key Laboratory of Tree-Ring Physical and Chemical Research

UIDM's most internationally distinctive asset is dendroclimatology. The institute hosts the Key Laboratory of Tree-Ring Physical and Chemical Research of China Meteorological Administration together with the Xinjiang Laboratory of Tree Ring Ecology — also rendered the Key Laboratory of Xinjiang Tree Ring Ecology. Instrumental records in Central Asia are short, so the laboratory reads climate history from the Schrenk spruce, Picea schrenkiana, of the Tianshan: ring widths measured on a LINTAB table to 0.001-millimetre precision under standard dendrochronological techniques, and stable carbon isotope ratios in ring cellulose that record humidity and temperature signals the widths alone cannot separate. Its cores are processed in Urumqi following International Tree Ring Data Bank sampling practice, two cores per tree in two directions. Few CMA laboratories work on timescales of centuries; this one does so routinely, and it is the institutional home behind the tree-ring element in the CMA's description of the institute.

Reconstructing Tianshan climate

The laboratory's published reconstructions show what that archive yields. In the northern Tianshan, five tree-ring width chronologies of Schrenk spruce were used to reconstruct annual maximum snow depth over roughly two centuries: radial growth proved positively related to maximum snow depth, the reconstruction explained 48.3 percent of the variance in instrumental records over the 1958/59 to 2003/04 calibration period, and the series alternated between lower-depth periods such as 1809/10 to 1840/41 and 1964/65 to 1981/82 and higher-depth periods such as 1894/95 to 1908/09 and 1982/83 onwards, with quasi-periodic changes on scales from two to 36 years — information of direct value in a region where heavy snowfall and extreme snow depth cause serious losses of life and property almost every winter. In the upper Tarim River basin, at the northern edge of the Taklimakan near Alaer, the laboratory reconstructed 195 years of growing-season relative humidity from tree-ring cellulose carbon isotopes in Populus euphratica desert riparian forest. In the Ili and Manas river basins, combined width and isotope chronologies were shown to track temperature, relative humidity and river baseflow, with the northern and southern Tianshan branches producing measurably different tree responses to the same climate.

Elevation, growth and a changing mountain climate

A further line of the laboratory's work asks how tree response itself varies with elevation, the key to trusting reconstructions under a warming climate. Sampling Schrenk spruce at different elevations on Wusun Mountain in the Yili region, institute researchers found that high-elevation growth is influenced primarily by meteorological factors in the non-growing season of the previous year, mid-elevation growth mainly by temperature, and low-elevation growth by both temperature and relative humidity. Such calibration work is the difference between a chronology and a climate record: it defines where on the mountainside the climate signal is cleanest for each variable. The laboratory's authors — including Qin Li, Ruibo Zhang, Shulong Yu, Tongwen Zhang and Huaming Shang in the bylines of these studies — publish steadily in journals such as Geochronometria and Forests, and the Yili work of 2023 confirms the laboratory remained active and productive into the present decade.

Desert atmosphere, land-air interaction and remote sensing

Beside the tree-ring programme, the CMA credits UIDM with strengths in the desert atmosphere, land-air interaction and hydrothermal circulation, and in applying satellite remote sensing technologies. These fields belong together in Xinjiang: over a sand desert, the exchange of heat and moisture between surface and air drives the boundary layer, the dust cycle and the oases' water balance, and satellites are the only practical way to observe the whole region continuously. Weather forecast research, the last item in the CMA's list, connects this science to Xinjiang's operational services, where dust storms, mountain snow, foehn-like winds and oasis agriculture all demand local forecast knowledge. The institute's agricultural and livestock meteorology work serves the same region practically: cotton and fruit production around the Tarim Basin and pastoralism on the Tianshan grasslands are both acutely weather-sensitive, and a desert-meteorology institute in Urumqi is the natural home for the applied research behind their forecasts and warnings.

Regional features and collaboration

The CMA's phrase professional advantages and regional features is, for UIDM, literal. Its collaborators map its terrain: the State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinjiang Normal University's geography school, the Xinjiang Climate Center and the region's meteorological bureaus all appear as partners on its papers. Its study sites ring its home region — Alaer and the upper Tarim, the Ili valley, the Manas basin, Wenquan's snow records, the Taklimakan interior. Even its street address tells the story of a working regional institute rather than a Beijing outpost. In return, the institute supplies the national system with something no other CMA institute can: an instrumented presence inside China's greatest desert and a tree-ring archive that extends Central Asian climate knowledge centuries before the first weather station.

Why the institute matters

Deserts cover a fifth of China's land, and the Taklimakan's dust, heat and dryness shape weather and livelihoods far beyond Xinjiang. The Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology is the CMA's dedicated centre for that environment: operator of desert observatory infrastructure in the Taklimakan, home of the national tree-ring physical and chemical research laboratory, and author of reconstructions that recover two centuries of Tianshan snow, humidity and streamflow from spruce and poplar wood. Its combination of the very new — satellite remote sensing, national observation stations — with the very old — tree rings laid down before the Qing dynasty ended — makes it one of the most distinctive institutes in Chinese meteorology, and the reference point for the climate of China's dry northwest mountains and deserts.

Official website: not recorded; institute listed by the China Meteorological Administration among its specialised research institutes.