For half a month, twice each day, she swam across the river to Coral Dam Island to feed her four newborn babies, and then swam back to the bank to seek food for herself.

She was an abandoned female dog, the mother of four puppies, and considered a heroine by local people in Chongqing Municipality, which had suffered excessive rainfall and floods that blocked the road to Coral Dam Island.

The story is a touching one, but far more human tragedies were taking place across China this summer, as many parts of the country were plagued by fierce rainstorms, triggering floods, landslides and mud-rock flows.

Disasters caused by heavy rains killed at least 71 people in central China's Hubei Province, 42 in the mountainous Chongqing Municipality, 54 in Sichuan, 163 in Yunnan, 40 in Shandong and 38 in the far northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China.

Though some parts of China have had too much rain, others had too little this summer, with long droughts, coupled with high temperatures, affecting 9.8 million hectares of crops in China, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

Cheng Dianlong, Deputy Chief of the agency, said Heilongjiang Province, most of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and many regions in south China have received 50 to 90 percent less rain since July than normal.

The drought has left 7.53 million people and 5.08 million head of livestock short of drinking water. It has also affected 44 percent of arable land in Jiangxi Province, 35 percent in Heilongjiang and 33 percent in Hunan.

The drought caused heavy losses to farm production as rice growing in the south and corn and soy production in the north were affected, according to Cheng.

Season of disasters

China's season of natural weather disasters did not end with the drought: other extreme weather conditions have also tortured the country.

On August 2 and 3, nine people were killed and almost 90,000 affected after windstorms ravaged east China's Anhui Province. The storms brought down 251 houses and damaged more than 2,000 others.

Five people were crushed to death when a two-story building collapsed after being struck by lightning in Linquan County, according to the provincial disaster relief office. Two other cities in the province each reported a death from lightning strikes.

According to China Meteorological Administration (CMA), lightning left 141 people dead in China in July, the highest monthly death toll since records began in 2000.

Song Lianchun, CMA Spokesman and head of the Disaster Forecast and Relief Department, said that this year China had been hit by increasingly frequent and severe lightning. The numbers of hailstorms and cyclones have also been rising.

Between the beginning of the year and June 30 various natural disasters across China had affected around 143 million people and resulted in 545 deaths, 78 missing and a total direct economic loss of 50 billion yuan, according to statistics produced by the Ministry of Civil Affairs .

Global warming

"It should be said that one of the reasons for the weather extremes this year has been unusual atmospheric circulation brought about by global warming," Song told a news conference carried live on the Central Government website on August 1.

"These kinds of extremes will become more frequent, and more obvious. This has already been borne out by the facts," he said. "I think the impact on our country will definitely be very large."