The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) is to start providing space weather forecasts, it said.
Space weather refers to changes in the space environment more than 80km above the Earth’s surface, including solar activity, ionospheric electron density and the magnetosphere, the bureau said.
The solar activities being monitored include solar flares, which are sudden flashes of increased brightness in the sun, and coronal mass ejections, which are giant clouds of solar plasma covered with magnetic field lines that are blown away from the sun during solar flares, the bureau said.
When a solar flare or a mass ejection occurs, solar radiation and charged particles increase, the bureau said, adding that these phenomena could cause geomagnetic disturbances or changes in the density of the ionosphere, both of which are regarded as severe space weather.
Changes in space weather can affect people’s daily lives, such as by disrupting the operations of satellites and interfering with radio wave communications, the bureau said.
More serious scenarios include disruptions of high-frequency communications and aberrations in GPS, the bureau said, adding that information could also be lost because of interrupted data transmissions.
“Aberrations in GPS readings can vary from 6m to more than 10m when GPS operations are affected by severe space weather. Drivers who depend solely on GPS for directions might not find their way. Power outages can happen in high-latitude countries because of severe space weather,” bureau space weather forecaster Lee I-te (李奕德) said.
Severe space weather can also interfere with the transmission of cable television signals and live broadcasts, Lee said.
Overseas broadcasts, weather broadcasts to fishing boats at sea and civil aviation communications could also be affected, Lee added.
The weather bureau’s astronomical observatory has been tracking sunspots and solar surface activity since 1948, the bureau’s meteorological information center director Mark Cheng (程家平) said.
“The launch of Formosat-3 in 2006 was a very important milestone, for Taiwan and the world, because of the massive amounts of data collected through the satellite. The CWB began to allocate more resources to the development of a space weather observation system. The bureau has also become one of the two space weather data processing centers in the world,” Cheng said.
National Central University, with whom the bureau has partnered to create the space weather forecast service, said the nation is located in the ionosphere’s equatorial anomaly zone. As a result, radio and satellite communications in Taiwan are often affected by changes in the ionosphere.
The university, one of the nation’s leading academic institutions in space science research, said it is honored to work with the bureau on space weather.
An advanced ionospheric probe created by the university forms part of Formosat-5, which was launched in August, it said, adding that the probe makes it possible to identify signs of imminent earthquakes and contribute to exploring severe space weather.
Up-to-date space weather information is available to the public through the weather bureau’s Space Weather Operational Office (swoo.cwb.gov.tw).
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