La Niña means "little girl, saint" in Spanish. La Niña events always occur after El Niño events and are a natural way to correct the climate imbalance caused by El Niño events. It is like a "twin sister" of El Niño with very different personalities, manifested in the obvious cooling of the waters in the eastern and central equatorial eastern Pacific. If El Niño is called a "warm" event, La Niña can be called a "cold" event accordingly. When the La Niña event occurred, there was more precipitation in Indonesia, eastern Australia, northeastern Brazil and other places. The equatorial region of Africa, southeastern United States and other places were prone to drought, and China was prone to cold winter.
From mid-January to early February 2008, when the La Niña event occurred, large-scale sustained disaster weather occurred in southern China: the lowest temperatures in Jianghuai, Jianghan, Jiangnan, and southwestern eastern China dropped to-8 ℃. Southern China has suffered the worst snow disaster in 50 years: the ice on the roads is as slippery as glass and as hard as iron; the ice on the high-voltage power lines is more than 10 centimeters thick, and houses have been frozen into "crystal palaces"; 136 trains in Guangdong "broke down" on the Beijing-Guangzhou line, and the Spring Festival transportation in Hunan Province was almost paralyzed. The snow disaster affected 32.87 million people in 10 provinces including Anhui, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Guizhou, including 129 deaths and 4 missing. At the same time, a severe cooling of 20 ° C occurred in the central United States; a sudden 10 mm heavy snow fell in Central Asia, breaking Baghdad's 100-year history of no snowfall; and the temperature in the northern fringe of Russia once dropped to-50 ° C.