Abstract: Climate change over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is characterized by high sensitivity and large amplitude, and the change of extreme weather and climate events are perceived as the principle factor in driving the transformation of environment and ecosystem around the TP. It is noteworthy that the warming amplitude over the TP is obviously larger than the average of China during the last decades. Moreover, the frequency of in situ extreme warm (cold) events presents a significant increasing (decreasing) trend, accompanied by the remarkable alternation of the other climatic elements such as wind speed and surface sensible heat source. Since the thermal forcing of the TP can efficiently modulate the atmospheric circulation and weather and climate to the downstream regions, the snow cover/depth in winter and intensity of the spring sensible heat source over the plateau were regarded as a key index in predicting the anomaly in East Asian summer monsoon and drought and flood disasters in the adjacent regions during the upcoming summer. Thereby it is necessary to explore the atmospheric components transportation processes and mechanism between the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere over and around the TP with coupled models, to pay much more attention to the influence of wet lands, and to build more station observations for evaluating the satellite data inversion, which will deepen the understanding about the extreme weather and climate events over and around the TP and its environmental effects so as to eventually provide scientific basis to the ecological security barrier construction over the TP.

Key words: Tibetan Plateau, ecological security barrier, extreme weather and climate event, environmental effect