Hong Kong
CNN
—
A deadly cold snap hitting East Asia has killed at least four people in Japan after freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall disrupted travel during the Lunar New Year holidays.
Japanese officials said all four people who died Wednesday and Thursday were working to clear snow amid what Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno called “the coldest wave in a decade.”
Two of the deaths were reported in western Niigata Prefecture, one in southwestern Oita Prefecture, and one in southern Okayama Prefecture from a heart attack.
Neighboring South Korea issued a heavy snow warning this week as temperatures in its capital Seoul dropped to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). Residents said it began to snow overnight from Wednesday night through Thursday.
On the popular tourist island of Jeju, bad weather this week has forced hundreds of flights to be canceled and passenger ships to stay in ports due to huge waves, according to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.
“Cold air from the North Pole has reached South Korea directly,” Woo Jin-gyu, a spokesman for the Korea Meteorological Agency, told CNN.
See what it’s like to live in one of the coldest places in the world
Wu said that while scientists take a long-term view of climate change, “this extreme weather (very hot summers and very cold winters) can be seen as one of the signals of climate change. I can,” he said.
Across the border in Pyongyang, North Korean officials warned of extreme weather as a cold wave hit the Korean peninsula. State media said temperatures were expected to drop below -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) in some parts of North Korea.
in Japan, Hundreds of domestic flights were canceled on Tuesday and Wednesday as heavy snow and high winds obstructed visibility. Major airlines Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways have canceled a total of 229 flights.
Meanwhile, the JR Group said high-speed trains were suspended between Fukushima North Station and Shinjo Station.
China’s meteorological authority is also forecasting significant temperature drops in parts of the country and issued a blue warning for cold snaps on Monday. This he is the lowest level in the four-stage alarm system.
In Mohe, China’s northernmost city, temperatures plunged to minus 53 degrees Celsius (minus 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Sunday, meteorologists said. Ice fog – a weather phenomenon in which water droplets in the air remain liquid and only occur in extremely cold weather – is also expected to form in the city this week, according to local officials.
Other parts of Asia were also affected by the severe cold weather.
Earlier this month, the temperature in the Russian Siberian city of Yakutsk was -62.7 degrees Celsius (-80.9 degrees Fahrenheit). This is a record for what is widely known as the coldest city in the world.
The cold is also being felt in Afghanistan, where Taliban officials reported that at least 157 people have died as the country experiences one of the coldest winters on record with minimal humanitarian aid. Early temperatures plummeted to minus 28 degrees Celsius (minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit).
Yeh Sang-wook, a professor of climatology at Hanyang University in Seoul, believes that the extreme cold wave on the Korean Peninsula is due to arctic winds blowing in from Siberia, and that this year’s cold wave in South Korea is due to the melting of the Arctic ice cap. I added that it was a thing. Mild climate.
“Last year and this year we had record thaws,” he said. “As the sea ice melts, the oceans open up, pumping more water vapor into the air and causing more snow to fall in the north.”
He said the region will face more severe cold in the future as climate change worsens.
“There is no other (explanation),” he said. “Climate change is indeed getting worse, and there is a consensus among global scientists that this type of cold weather event will get worse in the future.”
Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) agreed that “extreme weather events are the new normal,” adding, “We can certainly expect extreme weather events to be worse than they have been in the past. ‘ added.
He also pointed to the cycles of El Niño and La Niña climate patterns in the Pacific that affect weather around the world.
La Niñas, which normally cool the planet, are one of the causes of the current cold spell, he said.
“There’s certainly a lot of natural variability in weather…we hear a lot about El Niño events, but we’re currently in a La Niña period. And that certainly affects the kinds of patterns that are likely to occur. And that too. player,” he said.
