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The Once‐in‐a‐Century extreme rainstorm event caused severe floods over Henan province during July 18–21, 2021, which resulted in large casualty and property losses. Although the rainstorm event occurred in Henan after July 18, the excessive rainfall had occurred to the east of Henan before July 18, with the 4‐day accumulated rainfall exceeding +130 mm during July 14–17, 2021. How the rainfall evolving westward and intensifying after July 18 remained a puzzle, which is the focus of this study. The prerainstorm stage (July 14–17) was related to the South Asian High (SAH) extending eastward and the western Pacific subtropical high (WPSH) extending northwestward, and a low vortex between the SAH and WPSH caused above‐normal rainfall to the east of Henan. The rainstorm stage (July 18–21) was associated with an inverted trough and excessive southerly and southeasterly water vapor transportation above Henan, which resulted from the combined effects of a deep trough in the upper troposphere and typhoon activities. Additionally, three subseasonal forecasting systems predicted this rainstorm event 3 days in advance, with the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) performing the best, which was related to a better prediction of the inverted trough and the water vapor transportation in the middle‐lower troposphere. These results advance our understanding of the extreme rainstorm event in July 2021 in Henan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occurrence of a Ural blocking (UB) event is an important precursor of severe cold air outbreaks in Siberia and East Asia, and thus is significant to accurately predict UB events. Using subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) models of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), we evaluated the predictability of a persistent UB event on 18 to 26 January 2012. Results showed that the ECCC model was superior to the ECMWF model in predicting the development stage of the UB event ten days in advance, while the ECMWF model had better predictions than the ECCC model for more than ten days in advance and the decaying stage of the UB event. By comparing the dynamic and thermodynamic evolution of the UB event predicted by the two models via the geostrophic vorticity tendency equation and temperature tendency equation, we found that the ECCC model better predicted the vertical vorticity advection, ageostrophic vorticity tendency, the tilting effect, horizontal temperature advection, and adiabatic heating during the development stage, whereas the ECMWF model better predicted the three dynamic and the two thermodynamic terms during the decaying stage. In addition, during both the development and decaying stages, the two models were good (bad) at predicting the vortex stretching term (horizontal vorticity advection), with the PCC between both the predictions and the observations larger (smaller) than +0.70 (+0.10) Thus, we suggest that the prediction of the persistent UB event in the S2S model might be improved by the better prediction of the horizontal vorticity advection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]