Sun, Nov 15, 2020 page1

• Typhoons to halve by century’s end

  CLIMATE CHANGE: There would also be 40 to 60 percent less rainfall annually, with less winter rainfall, affecting farmers’ planting of rice in the spring, a researcher said

  • By Chien Hui-ju and William Hetherington / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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  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.

  

  The main entrance to the Academia Sinica building in Taipei’s Nangang District is pictured on Tuesday.

  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.
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