The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) came under fire yesterday for its lack of accuracy in forecasts about Tropical Storm Kalmaegi, especially regarding the intensity of the rains.
Even President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) expressed dissatisfaction with the bureau, asking it yesterday to conduct a review and work to improve its weather reports.
In Taichung City’s Mayuan (麻園), creeks and rivers overflowed, causing many main roads to flood. Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) expressed shock over the extent of the flooding in the city.
PHOTO: CHAN CHAO-YANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Director of the CWB’s weather forecast center Daniel Wu (吳德榮) said yesterday that the bureau had warned two days prior that there would be heavy rains in central and southern regions.
Air currents to the west and south usually occur after a tropical storm, but in Kalmaegi’s case, the currents occurred almost simultaneously with the tropical storm, he said.
“Therefore, the storm was extremely difficult to forecast,” Wu said.
The CWB said later yesterday that an aircraft carrying weather reconnaissance equipment had been dispatched to collect information on the outer structure of the storm as it approached.
However, it still could not obtain detailed information on the intensity and changes in the typhoon’s center, the bureau said.
The National Science Council has been supporting a project called the “Dropwindsonde Observation for Typhoon Surveillance near the Taiwan Region” (DOTSTAR), in which aircraft are sent close to the center of approaching typhoons to collect data on rain and wind conditions.
However, this was not enough, a bureau official said.
“The weather service in the US is able to dispatch a flight every six hours to continually observe changes in storms’ structures,” Wu said.
“However, DOTSTAR will only [dispatch a flight] once a typhoon comes close,” the CWB director said.
The bureau’s deputy director Shin Tzay-chyn (辛在勤) said the bureau would work with DOTSTAR scientists to expand the scale of the project.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching