Two advanced weather buoys deployed by National Taiwan University (NTU) marine researchers on deep ocean provided a “miracle” in the history of weather data collection, as they collected rare real-time field data when Typhoon Nepartak traveled right across them, researchers said yesterday.
The two buoys were placed last month about 180 nautical miles (333km) and 250 nautical miles southeast of Taiwan’s southernmost tip, Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), precisely in the path of Nepartak — the strongest first typhoon of the Pacific typhoon season ever to strike Taiwan, oceanography professor Chang Ming-huei (張明輝) told a news conference held by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Chang’s team deployed the buoys at “typhoon hotspots” after analyzing historical typhoon tracks, and one week after the buoys were moored, they faced Napartak head-on.
Nepartak’s eye crossed directly through the two buoys, and they collected rare real-time field data, such as sudden drops in atmospheric pressure and sea temperatures, as well as wind gust velocity, which could be used to predict how much energy the typhoon gained and how strong it would become, Chang said.
“Placing the buoys precisely in the typhoon’s path is less likely than winning the lottery. That is why people call it a miracle in the history of typhoon data collection,” NTU Institute of Oceanography director Wei Ching-ling (魏慶琳) said.
“The close observation of Nepartak and real-time data transmission was an extreme rarity and caught the attention of international meteorologists, especially in the US, because the typhoon was much stronger than Atlantic hurricanes,” Wei said.
Potentially due to their design, the buoys survived Nepartak, which had a peak wind speed of 45m per second.
Weather buoys are generally powered by solar panels, which reduce the buoys’ resistance to wind due to increased mass, so the team chose to fit its buoys with a durable battery system and an energy-efficient control system that can sustain the buoys for more than a year.
Actual field data is more accurate than data collected with remote sensing satellites by between 200 percent and 300 percent, and the buoys can observe 10 types of marine weather data, such as sea temperatures, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, the direction and strength of currents, Chang said.
Showing a location map of weather buoys around the world’s oceans, he said the sea to the east of Taiwan was one of the few common typhoon paths where hardly any buoys were deployed.
“It is the nation’s responsibility to set up weather buoys there, because neighboring countries such as the Philippines and Japan either do not have the technology to build a reliable buoy system or are not prone to typhoons,” Chang said.
The low-cost buoys cost about NT$10 million (US$314,960) each and took six months to build.
All data is provided to the Central Weather Bureau to improve the nation’s forecast precision and disaster-prevention preparedness.
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