The number of typhoons that make landfall in Taiwan in the last quarter of the 21st century is expected to be roughly half the number that landed from 1979 to 2015, due to the effects of climate change, a researcher said.
There are likely to be 44 percent to 54 percent fewer typhoons hitting Taiwan at the end of the century, which would result in 40 to 60 percent less rainfall annually, Academia Sinica researcher Hsu Huang-hsiung (許晃雄) said on Tuesday, adding that the situation would hugely affect the nation’s agriculture and water supply.
Taiwan would also experience increasingly warmer winters and springs, he said.
Photo: Chien Hui-ju, Taipei Times
Hsu said that he and his research team used a high-resolution atmospheric model in their analysis of climate change in East Asia and the northwestern Asia-Pacific.
The team discovered that a weakening of atmospheric circulation during winter would contribute to a reduction in rainfall in winter and spring, he said.
Reduced winter rainfall would affect farmers’ ability to sow rice in the spring, he added.
The team found that there would be a reduction in summer and autumn rainfall above the South China and Philippine seas, caused by increases in the high-pressure systems there, he said.
For northern Taiwan, springtime southwesterly winds are an important annual source of rain, he said.
The conditions that would bring those winds are situated off the southwest coast of Taiwan proper, but in their research, the team found that they would move northward, causing reduced rainfall in northern Taiwan, he said.
The northwestern Pacific Ocean is expected to see the greatest decrease in typhoon activity of all the planet’s oceans, he said.
Typhoons that do occur at latitudes above 20 degrees north latitude would become stronger, and those south of that latitude would become weaker, he said.
Ocean temperatures near Taiwan would increase by about 3°C, and although typhoons hitting Taiwan would bring 4 to 8 percent stronger winds, as well as 30 to 40 percent more rain than current typhoons, a decrease in the number of typhoons would mean an overall decrease in annual rainfall, he said.
The team collected long-term data from various sources, such as climate change research by the Ministry of Science and Technology and Academia Sinica, he said, adding that analysis models were processed using the National Center for High-performance Computing’s Taiwania 1 supercomputer.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS