Typhoon Gaemi's Heavy Rains Help Fill Up Taiwan’s Reservoirs
Taiwan's reservoirs, which have been low in recent years, have been replenished after heavy rains brought by Typhoon Gaemi. Chris Gorin speaks to climatologist Shih-Yu Lee at Academia Sinica to learn more about how typhoons affect the country's water supply.
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00:00What are some of the benefits that a typhoon can bring to Taiwan's water supply that people
00:05might not be aware of?
00:07So first is the increase of water, the amount of water we can use as water resources that
00:13was stored in the reservoir.
00:15I think it also sort of recharged the groundwaters.
00:20That's another sort of natural reservoir for available water resources.
00:26And if I wanted to add, yeah, maybe one more is it's a hydropower.
00:32So I guess we can read from Taipower's publication during the days of typhoon, there are two
00:39power generations that spikes high.
00:42One is like a wind power and then the other is hydropower.
00:46Is there a flip side to that?
00:47I mean, can a typhoon bring dangers to Taiwan's water supply?
00:51The downside for typhoon is, of course, it caused a huge scale of flooding that we've
00:57seen in the news report.
00:59But then I think also because of heavy rainfall, so it also generated very fast runoff.
01:08And these runoff are sources of erosions to the river channels, erode some sediments.
01:16And those sediments would decrease the capacity, say, when you have a bucket and the bottom
01:23of the bucket was filled up with sand, those sediments, yeah, makes the river channel shallow
01:30or it makes the reservoir being shallower so that the amount of water that can store
01:37in the future becomes smaller.
01:39With the changing climate, are we seeing any changes to the frequency or intensity of typhoons
01:45here in Taiwan?
01:47We have probably the same numbers of typhoon, but in terms of strength, it increased since
01:541980s.
01:55But then when we use the same tools that we used to do a climate simulation and trying
02:01to project it into the future, we see a decrease in terms of number of typhoon.
02:07That sounds counterintuitive, decrease in terms of number, but then increase in terms
02:13of strength and increase in precipitations.