Southern China Freezes Monday Damage Crops
By Drew Lerner
Kansas City, January 25 (World Weather Inc.) – Assessments of damage from this morning’s freeze in China has just begun, but some locations saw their coldest weather in more than two decades and the impact will likely be widespread to agriculture in southern China. Damage to many fruits 
and vegetables has occurred along with some sugarcane, citrus, mangoes and a host berries.
The assessment of lost production in southern China is just beginning, but the cold today was the greatest seen in many years and the impact is likely to be large. Low temperatures were in the upper teens and 20s Fahrenheit from the lower Yangtze River into all of Zhejiang and Fujian with readings in the 20s in Jiangxi, Hunan and much of Guizhou. The cold reach into portions of Yunnan and there were some reports of frost and in northeastern Vietnam, as well.
Sugarcane is being harvested with much of the crop already collected, but significant freezes to the cane at this time of year can have a negative impact on production for 2016. Citrus trees may have been damaged in parts of southeastern China where lower to middle 20s Fahrenheit is often considered a potential threat to trees that are not adequately harden against the cold. Most of the citrus and sugarcane 
area of southeastern China had already been dealing with cold weather prior to this morning and that likely helped trees toughen up against the cold, but significant freezes like that of today is rare and there is little doubt that some damage will occur.
Southern China produces a considerable amount of fresh fruit varying from Strawberries, raspberries and blueberries to mangoes and banana. China is the second largest mango producing area in the world behind India.
Much warmer temperatures are expected over the next few days, but a cool bias may prevail for another week or two with readings similar to those of last week and the week before. No further bouts of damaging cold like this is expected.
Winter wheat in northern China might have been damaged in a few fields where snow cover was minimal and temperatures slipped to the positive and negative single digits. No threatening cold occurred to rapeseed and most of the damage in China was in southern areas and not the north even though the Northeastern Provinces reported some extreme lows down near and below -40 degrees Fahrenheit.
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