Water resource security is an important condition for socio-economic development. Recently, the process of urbanization brings increasing pressures on water resources. Thus, a good understanding of harmonious development of urbanization and water resource security (WRS) systems is necessary. This paper examined the coordination state between urbanization and WRS and its obstacle factors in Beijing city, utilizing the improved coupling coordination degree (ICCD) model, obstacle degree model, and indicator data from 2008 to 2017. Results indicated that: (1) The coupling coordination degree between WRS and urbanization displayed an overall upward tendency during the 2008–2017 period; the coupling coordination state has changed from an imbalanced state into a good coordination state, experiencing from a high-speed development stage (2008–2010), through a steady growth stage (2010–2014), towards a low-speed growth (2014–2017). (2) In urbanization system, both the social and spatial urbanizations have the greatest obstruction to the development of urbanization-WRS system. The subsystems of pressure and state are the domain obstacle subsystems in WRS system. These results can provide important support for urban planning and water resource protection in the future, and hold great significance for urban sustainable development.

China is subjected to severe dust storms that deteriorate air quality and cause substantial damages to environment and socioeconomics. Although the annual frequency of severe dust storms in China has been declining since the 1950s, the variability of severe dust storm occurrence in time and space remains inadequately described under the changing climate. Based on the continuous observation at 368 meteorological observation sites across the mainland China over a 50‐year period (1958 to 2007), we found that the temporal clustering of severe dust storm outbreak has intensified after 1985, which exacerbated the irregularity in the monthly distribution of severe dust storms. Moreover, the timing of the clustering has shown a higher interannual variation after 1985. Therefore, the variability of severe dust storm occurrence has increased significantly since the 1980s at the annual and monthly time scales. In addition, the relative probability of experiencing severe dust storms with a large influential range has risen since the 1980s. Spatially, severe dust storm outbreak has receded from spreading across the country in the 1950s to primarily affecting north and northwest China in the 2000s. These findings suggest a relatively higher risk of dust storm disaster in north and northwest China that is associated with the intensified clustering of severe dust storm activity in both time and space. Continuous studies are needed to identify the favorable synoptic system that stimulates the clustering of severe dust storm outbreak. We advocate more efforts to enhance severe dust storm prediction and warning dissemination in north and northwest China.