Heat waves, particularly humid heat waves that occur together with high temperatures and humidity, pose a severe hazard to human health in the context of global warming. In this work, daily observations from more 1500 sites are used to define dry and humid heat waves in a warm season (May to September) and assess their spatiotemporal characteristics during 1960–2015. Dry heat waves are identified with daily maximum temperatures, while humid heat waves are identified based on the wet bulb temperature, derived from both temperature and humidity. We compare dry and humid heat waves from various aspects based on multiple heat wave indices, including their frequency, duration, and intensity. Results suggest that the occurrence of both dry and humid heat wave days in China is higher in the southern than in the northern part of China, due to the higher air temperature and humidity therein. Compared to dry heat waves, humid heat waves are of higher amplitude but shorter duration. The long-term trend analysis shows that the occurrence of both dry and humid heat waves has increased overall over the last 50 years, with an especially rapid increase in the last 20 years, which may be related to China’s rapid warming since the late 1980s. The future projections with multiple global climate models indicate that China will experience more frequent, stronger, and longer-duration dry and humid heat waves in the future, under both intermediate and high-emission pathways.

The station observations and reanalysis dataset are utilized to explore the effects of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) on the cold extremes over the whole country of China, and the possible mechanisms from the perspective of the thermodynamics. Here, we focus on the principal modes of different phases of MJO in winter and their influences on the large scale cold events (LSCEs) that are identified firstly. The time evolution and the spatial features of LSCEs are checked for a basic insight of the LSCEs in China, of which the annual variability and regional differences are obvious among the chosen LSECs. In addition, the first (second) empirical orthogonal decomposition mode of MJO shows an opposite feature that positive values in Phases 1–3 (Phase 4–5) and negative values in Phases 5–7 (Phase 7–8), with the explanation of variance at 30.6% (26%). Furthermore, according to the threshold of ±1.5 in standardized time series of two principal components (PC1 and PC2), the events are chosen and clarified into four cases (+PC1, –PC1, +PC2 and –PC2). All the MJO-related cases present the increases of LSCEs but with regional and intensity differences. For the case of +PC1, the cold advection from higher latitudes transport to eastern Asia inducing negative temperature anomalies thereof. For the case of –PC1, besides the eastern Asian region, there still the cold advections across the Inner Mongolia regions, leaving negative anomalies over the region either. For the case of +PC2, the southward wind and the accompanied cold advection are stronger than the others affecting mostly regions in China, which leads to the more decreases of temperature. For the case of –PC2, the cold advections are weaker, resulting in the less temperature decreases over the southeastern China. Meanwhile, the tropospheric cyclonic and anti-cyclonic circulation anomalies are beneficial to the persistence of local extremes.