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This study focuses on the evolution of flood risk in the Yangtze River Basin under climate change, which is a critical issue for socioeconomic development in future. In this study, we (1) compared the 1998 and 2020 floods and found that the destructiveness of a given discharge is now greater than before; (2) revealed three issues related to the above finding; and (3) prospected the future development of up-to-date technologies to better address the issue that floods with high water levels will frequently threaten us. The outcomes of this study would be of great significance to future flood control operation of large river basins.

The termination of Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events is examined in terms of equatorial wave dynamics. In situ and satellite observations combined with an output from a linear wave model are used in this study. Our emphasis is on the 1997 IOD event but our results apply to other positive IOD events as well. We find that the termination of anomalously cold sea surface temperature (SST) in the eastern pole of the dipole is associated with a warming tendency caused by the net surface heat fluxes. However, net surface heat fluxes alone cannot explain the total change in the SST. We show that during the peak phase of an IOD event, the weakening of zonal heat advection caused by eastern boundary-generated Rossby waves combined with the reduction of vertical entrainment and diffusion creates favorable conditions for surface heat fluxes to warm the SST in the eastern basin.

Landslides are considered as major natural hazards that cause enormous property damages and fatalities in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). In this article, we evaluated the landslide susceptibility, and its spatial differencing in the whole Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau region using five state-of-the-art learning algorithms; deep neural network (DNN), logistic regression (LR), Naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM), differing from previous studies only in local areas of QTP. The 671 landslide events were considered, and thirteen landslide conditioning factors (LCFs) were derived for database generation, including annual rainfall, distance to drainage $${(\mathrm{Ds}}_{\mathrm{d}})$$ , distance to faults $${(\mathrm{Ds}}_{\mathrm{f}})$$ , drainage density ( $${D}_{d})$$ , elevation (Elev), fault density $$({F}_{d})$$ , lithology, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), plan curvature $${(\mathrm{Pl}}_{\mathrm{c}})$$ , profile curvature $${(\mathrm{Pr}}_{\mathrm{c}})$$ , slope $${(S}^{^\circ })$$ , stream power index (SPI), and topographic wetness index (TWI). The multi-collinearity analysis and mean decrease Gini (MDG) were used to assess the suitability and predictability of these factors. Consequently, five landslide susceptibility prediction (LSP) maps were generated and validated using accuracy, area under the receiver operatic characteristic curve, sensitivity, and specificity. The MDG results demonstrated that the rainfall, elevation, and lithology were the most significant landslide conditioning factors ruling the occurrence of landslides in Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The LSP maps depicted that the north-northwestern and south-southeastern regions (< 32% of total area) were at a higher risk to landslide compared to the center, west, and northwest of the area (> 45% of total area). Moreover, among the five models with a high goodness-of-fit, RF model was highlighted as the superior one, by which higher accuracy of landslide susceptibility assessment and better prone areas management in QTP can be achieved compared to previous results.

The solar wind energy is transmitted to low latitude ionosphere in a current circuit from a dynamo in the magnetosphere to the equatorial ionosphere via the polar ionosphere. During the substorm growth phase and storm main phase, the dawn-to-dusk convection electric field is intensified by the southward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), driving the ionospheric DP2 currents composed of two-cell Hall current vortices in high latitudes and Pedersen currents amplified at the dayside equator (EEJ). The EEJ-Region-1 field-aligned current (R1 FAC) circuit is completed via the Pedersen currents in midlatitude. On the other hand, the shielding electric field and the Region-2 FACs develop in the inner magnetosphere, tending to cancel the convection electric field at the mid-equatorial latitudes. The shielding often causes overshielding when the convection electric field reduces substantially and the EEJ is overcome by the counter electrojet (CEJ), leading to that even the quasi-periodic DP2 fluctuations are contributed by the overshielding as being composed of the EEJ and CEJ. The overshielding develop significantly during substorms and storms, leading to that the mid and low latitude ionosphere is under strong influence of the overshielding as well as the convection electric fields. The electric fields on the day- and night sides are in opposite direction to each other, but the electric fields in the evening are anomalously enhanced in the same direction as in the day. The evening anomaly is a unique feature of the electric potential distribution in the global ionosphere. DP2-type electric field and currents develop during the transient/short-term geomagnetic disturbances like the geomagnetic sudden commencements (SC), which appear simultaneously at high latitude and equator within the temporal resolution of 10 s. Using the SC, we can confirm that the electric potential and currents are transmitted near-instantaneously to low latitude ionosphere on both day- and night sides, which is explained by means of the light speed propagation of the TM0 mode waves in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide.

We used Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time series data to estimate the spatiotemporal slip distribution for a long-term slow slip event (L-SSE) that occurred in the Tokai region, central Japan, from 2012 to 2016. Since all the used GNSS data were affected by the postseismic deformation associated with the 2011 Mw9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, we removed such postseismic signal from the time series of three components at each of the stations. The minimal time window for an inversion analysis was set to 0.5 years (6 months), taking into account the signal-to-noise ratio of displacements for each time window. In the horizontal displacement fields, displacements were observed in the south‒southeast and southeast directions on the west and east sides of Lake Hamana, respectively, with temporal changes in their amounts and directions. In the vertical displacement fields, uplift was observed on the east side of Lake Hamana. From these data, we estimated the L-SSE initiated in approximately 2012.5 and ended by 2017.0, indicating the duration time is 4.5 years and the duration was much longer than that obtained in a previous study. Using these data, we performed the inversion analysis, in which three a priori information were assumed, i.e., the spatial distribution of slip is smooth, slip mainly occurs in the direction of plate convergence, and the temporal variation in the slip is smooth, to obtain the spatiotemporal slip distribution on a plate boundary with 3-D geometry. As a result, we identified that the L-SSE consisted of two subevents. The first subevent initiated on the southwest side of Lake Hamana and expanded during the period from 2013.0 to 2014.5. The maximum slip velocity during the period from 2012.5 to 2017.0 was estimated to be approximately 3.5 cm/year there for 2013.5–2014.0. The second subevent took place on the west side of Lake Hamana gradually from 2015.0 to 2015.5, continued, and expanded from 2015.5 to 2016.5. From the cumulative slip distribution, we found that its shape spread in the dip direction and obtained a maximum slip of approximately 10.6 cm, a moment release of 2.7 × 1019 Nm, and an equivalent moment magnitude of 6.9. Comparing our results with the L-SSE that occurred in the Tokai region between 2000 and 2005, we found that the slip initiation location was almost the same, but the subsequent slip location was more southerly for the 2012–2016 Tokai L-SSE. Additionally, the maximum slip velocity and moment magnitude were smaller for the 2012–2016 L-SSE.

Victoria mode (VM), the second dominant mode of North Pacific sea surface temperature variability, has been identified as one of the important factors influencing the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) onset. The positive phase of the May VM delays the ISM onset by both tropical and extratropical pathways. Here, we found a significant interdecadal enhancement of their relationship since the early 1990s, which is mainly attributed to the structure changes and increased variance of the VM. In recent decades, the VM has shown more significant warm SST anomalies in the tropical central Pacific, which drive the large-scale divergent circulation more effectively. This enhanced divergent circulation leads to low-level divergence and reduced rainfall in the tropical Asian summer monsoon region. The reduced rainfall excites equatorial Rossby wave response and anomalous easterly winds in the northern Indian Ocean, delaying the ISM onset. Besides, the increased variance of the VM after 1992/1993 stimulates a stronger extratropical Rossby wave train. This stationary Rossby wave train induces a stronger cooling to the northwest of India, which weakens the land-sea thermal contrast and leads to the delayed ISM onset. This finding should be taken into account to improve short-term predictions of the monsoon onset.

In Taiwan, research and education of solar terrestrial sciences began with a ground-based ionosonde operated by Ministry of Communications in 1952 and courses of ionospheric physics and space physics offered by National Central University (NCU) in 1959, respectively. Since 1990, to enhance both research and education, the Institute of Space Science at NCU has been setting up and operating ground-based observations of micropulsations, very high-frequency radar, low-latitude ionospheric tomography network, high-frequency Doppler sounder, digital ionosondes, and total electron content (TEC) derived from ground-based GPS receivers to study the morphology of the ionosphere for diurnal, seasonal, geophysical, and solar activity variations, as well as the ionosphere response to solar flares, solar wind, solar eclipses, magnetic storms, earthquakes, tsunami, and so on. Meanwhile, to have better understanding on physics and mechanisms, model simulations for the heliosphere, solar wind, magnetosphere, and ionosphere are also introduced and developed. After the 21 September 1999 Mw7.6 Chi–Chi earthquake, seismo-ionospheric precursors and seismo-traveling ionospheric disturbances induced by earthquakes become the most interesting and challenging research topics of the world. The development of solar terrestrial sciences grows even much faster after National Space Origination has been launching a series of FORMOSAT satellites since 1999. ROCSAT-1 (now renamed FORMOSAT-1) measures the ion composition, density, temperature, and drift velocity at the 600-km altitude in the low-latitude ionosphere; FORMOSAT-2 is to investigate lightning-induced transient luminous events, polar aurora, and upper atmospheric airglow, and FORMOSAT-3 probes ionospheric electron density profiles of the globe. In the near future, FORMOSAT-5 and FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 will be employed for studying solar terrestrial sciences. These satellite missions play an important role on the recent development of solar terrestrial sciences in Taiwan.