Drought is one of the natural disasters with the widest impact and the most serious economic losses in China, which directly threatens the country’s food security and socio-economic development. The understanding and research on drought will help to improve the national capacity of drought prevention and mitigation. Since 1949, China’s research on drought meteorology has achieved fruitful results. Based on the research results of the scientific research project group related to drought meteorology carried out by the Key Open Laboratory of Arid Climate Change and Disaster Reduction of China Meteorological Administration since the 21st century, through the achievement retrieval, this paper summarizes the new progress in drought monitoring technology, drought temporal and spatial distribution, drought disaster-causing characteristics, drought disaster risk and its response to climate warming, as well as drought disaster risk management and defense technology. At the same time, based on the frontier development trend of drought meteorology research, on the basis of strengthening the comprehensive drought observation test in drought prone areas under the background of climate change, this paper puts forward that China’s drought meteorology research in future should study quantitatively the formation mechanism of drought from different dimensions and scales, build a new comprehensive drought monitoring method of multi-source data fusion and multi-method combination, reveal the mechanism of drought disaster-causing and evaluate scientifically the drought disaster risk, putting forward the executable risk management strategies. This work is of positive significance to promoting drought meteorological research in China.

Keywords： drought meteorology; drought monitoring; drought disaster-causing; drought disaster risk; climate warming