Several provinces of China experienced an intense drought episode during 2009 and 2010. The drought was particularly severe in southwestern and northern China, where the accumulated precipitation from May 2009 to April 2010 was about 25% less than normal. The decline of accumulated precipitation over northern China was mostly noticeable during the summer season of 2009 and it was comparable to recent dry episodes. The southwestern China drought resulted from a sequence of dry months from summer 2009 to winter 2010, corresponding to the driest event since at least 1951. The suppression of rainfall in summer over both regions was in agreement with a weakened broad-scale South Asian summer monsoon, possibly influenced by an El Niño developing phase, whereas the extremely negative phases of the Arctic Oscillation during the winter of 2010 may have contributed to the persistence of the drought in southwestern China. The assessment of the associated impacts indicates that water reservoirs were severely affected with a ~20% reduction in the nationwide hydroelectrical production during the drought event. Furthermore, an analysis of the normalized difference vegetation index data reveals that large cropland sectors of northern and eastern China experienced up to 8 months of persistently stressed vegetation between May 2009 and July 2010, while southwestern China was relatively less affected. Such different regional vegetative responses are interpreted in terms of the land-cover type, agriculture management, and their dependence on seasonal precipitation and water availability for irrigation.

The thermal contrast between the Asian continent and the adjacent oceans is the primary aspect of the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) that can be well represented in the sea level pressure (SLP) field. Based on this consideration, a new SLP-based index measuring the intensity of the EAWM is proposed by explicitly taking into account both the east–west and the north–south pressure gradients around East Asia. The new index can delineate the EAWM-related circulation anomalies well, including the deepened (shallow) midtropospheric East Asian trough, sharpened and accelerated (widened and decelerated) upper-tropospheric East Asian jet stream, and enhanced (weakened) lower-tropospheric northerly winds in strong (weak) EAWM winters. Compared with previous indices, the new index has a very good performance describing the winter-mean surface air temperature variations over East Asia, especially for the extreme warm or cold winters. The index is strongly correlated with several atmospheric teleconnections including the Arctic Oscillation, the Eurasian pattern, and the North Pacific Oscillation/western Pacific pattern, implying the possible internal dynamics of the EAWM variability. Meanwhile, the index is significantly linked to El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the sea surface temperature (SST) over the tropical Indian Ocean. Moreover, the SST anomalies over the tropical Indian Ocean are more closely related to the index than ENSO as an independent predictor. This adds further knowledge to the prediction potentials of the EAWM apart from ENSO. The predictability of the index is high in the hindcasts of the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM) model from Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction (DEMETER). Hence, it would be a good choice to use this index for the monitoring, prediction, and research of the EAWM.