Abstract:Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, posing serious threats to food security in China through increasingly severe agrometeorological disasters. Disaster indicators, as quantitative tools linking meteorological stresses with agricultural responses, play a central role in disaster risk management. It focused on the development and application of agrometeorological disaster indicators for major crops in China, systematically summarized the evolution of indicators for typical single and compound disasters, including drought, waterlogging, heat stress, chilling injury and frost damage, as well as compound heat-drought events, dry-hot wind, persistent cloudy and rainy weather, and combined low-temperature and low-light stress. The major approaches for constructing disaster indicators, including controlled experiments, statistical models, and crop growth models, were also reviewed in terms of their applicability. The results showed that agrometeorological disaster indicators had generally evolved from single meteorological thresholds to multi-factor integrated indices, from characterization of hazardous environmental conditions to representation of crop responses, and from identification of individual hazards to assessment of compound disasters. However, current indicator systems still suffer from imbalanced functional development among monitoring, early warning, and risk assessment, insufficient capacity to characterize the dynamic evolution of disaster processes, and inadequate linkages between disaster indicators and crop physiological and ecological responses, yield losses, and quality deterioration. Future research should clearly distinguish the functions of monitoring, early warning, and risk assessment, develop dynamic indicators based on crop-sensitive growth stages, and promote multi-source integration of remote sensing, crop models, and artificial intelligence. These advances were of great significance for improving agrometeorological services and maintaining the stability of the national food supply.