Former Central Weather Bureau (CWB) forecast center director Daniel Wu (吳德榮) yesterday criticized CWB acting director-general Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典), saying that Cheng inaccurately predicted that the nation would see an early end to the plum rain season and that Cheng’s comments compromised the bureau’s credibility.
With a weather front moving north, the nation has had high temperatures and afternoon showers in the past few weeks due to the dominant influence of a Pacific high-pressure system, a sign of an early termination of the plum rain season, Cheng said on Facebook on Sunday, adding that the rain could return later this month.
In his online column yesterday, Wu said that Cheng’s prediction of a second plum rain season contradicted his assertion of an early end to the season.
Photo: Liu Pin-chuan, Taipei Times
The center on May 31 published a long-term weather forecast, which showed that rainfall this month is highly likely to be within the normal range, Wu said, adding that the report did not say that there would be an early end to the plum rain season.
“The report offers a rather accurate long-term weather forecast, but I am afraid its credibility has been greatly weakened by the acting director-general’s remarks on Facebook,” Wu said.
Despite the technology available, there was no way for meteorologists to tell at the end of last month or the beginning of this month whether there would still be plum rain fronts affecting the nation in the second half of this month, he said.
Cheng spoke too soon and contradicted information published by the bureau, Wu said, adding that historical weather data show that it is quite normal to have one or two relatively dry weeks amid the plum rain season.
The fourth front of the plum rain season, a stationary front, is expected to move close to Taiwan on Sunday along with a southeasterly airstream, based on simulations conducted by meteorologists in the EU and the US, Wu said.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS