Taipei, Aug. 3 (CNA) The FormoSat-7 satellite group, a U.S.-Taiwan collaboration that could be launched by the end of this year, will greatly improve the world's typhoon prediction capabilities, the deputy head of the Central Weather Bureau said Friday.
The FormoSat-7 project, which will contain a constellation of six satellites, will help gather intensive data at sea between latitudes 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south, said Cheng Chia-ping.
That mostly tropical area is where many storms form and thanks to the low inclination of the satellites, with just 24 degrees between their position and the equator, more crucial information could be collected, he told CNA.
FormoSat-7 is expected to obtain three times as much data from the area as FormoSat-3, the satellite the CWB and many of the world's weather centers currently depend on, Cheng said.
The two projects target different geological regions since FormoSat-3 has a high inclination angle of 72 degrees, he explained.
The FormoSat-7 project will also complement data from sea, a traditional blind spot and the greatest challenge for weather forecasting, Cheng said.
While land-based weather stations are relatively easily to build, there are not enough monitoring instruments at sea, making it difficult to analyze storms in their formative stages, he said.
"Without sufficient information, running our numerical weather prediction model is simply a matter of 'garbage in, garbage out,'" he said.
In addition to horizontal data, the FormoSat-7 satellites will also be able to build a vertical profile of the atmosphere every 100 meters up from sea level, enabling a more 3-dimensional understanding of weather conditions, Cheng said.
Since the FormoSat-7 satellites receive global navigation satellite system signals from both global positioning system and Russian global navigation system satellites, the weather information will be better integrated, ensuring more accurate forecasts, he added.
