Chances are now higher that Tropical Storm Koppu could affect Taiwan and the angle at which it turns north from the Philippines is likely to determine what impact the storm will have, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday.
Bureau data showed that there are two tropical storms in the West Pacific Ocean, including Koppu and tropical storm Champi.
While the bureau forecasts that Champi is headed for Japan, it predicts Koppu could move toward the Philippines before turning north.
At 5pm yesterday, the center of Koppu was 1,260km southeast of Oluanbi (鵝鑾鼻). It was moving west at 14kph, with wind gusts near the storm’s center reaching speeds of up to 119kph.
Bureau Director Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典) said that Koppu is approaching relatively warmer seas with a weak vertical sheer wind.
The bureau forecasts that the storm could continue to strengthen because of advantageous conditions and could become a typhoon today, he said.
The bureau would be able to make a better determination as to whether the storm will make landfall in Taiwan from the angle at which it turns north, he added.
Cheng said that the bureau would closely monitor the storm’s northbound movement between Sunday and Tuesday, adding that one degree difference in the angle at which Koppu turns could mean a difference in hundreds of kilometers.
Cheng said that the bureau predicted Koppu would not make landfall in the Philippines.
Former Weather Forecast Center director Daniel Wu (吳德榮) said that Koppu might strengthen into a typhoon before it approaches Luzon Island, but it is unlikely to gain more strength because its structure would be damaged by topography in the Philippines.
He said that the storm could turn into a weaker typhoon after passing through the Philippines.
He said that a report from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on Wednesday predicted that Koppu would be guided by high air pressure to move west toward Luzon.
The report also showed that the storm would slow down and remain stagnant for a little while before moving north.
Wu said that the center had produced 51 projected paths of movement after Koppu turns north.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS