Smartec sends ZephIR Lidar in to the Taipei Basin with the National Taiwan University

Since its foundation in 1993, Smartec has been specialising in weather stations, water quality, ocean current measurement and system integration. In 2012 Smartec consolidated its reputation in the offshore wind market by joining the Taiwan offshore wind farm pilot project where they integrated two meteorological systems on Taipower and TGC offshore met mast.

The company has owned and operated remote sensing wind lidar devices since 2016 and this latest deployment with NTU (above) sees the ZephIR 300 ground-based wind lidar acting as the reference for a mix of weather measurement sensors including a long range boundary layer wind profiler and a microwave radiometer used to study radiation emitted by thermal gases.

The wind measurement campaign will be used by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, National Taiwan University to provide better forecasting of ‘convectional precipitation’ – a particularly intense period of rainfall that occurs in the region whereby its occurrence and severity are of particular interest.

Professor Lin of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at NTU commented: “We are undertaking significant research into weather patterns in the Taipei Basin and Smartec have helped us to deploy and operate this incredible, flexible wind lidar tool – ZephIR 300. We can take reference wind measurements up to two hundred metres above our test centre at the National Taiwan University and correlate other measurements systems to it to improve the accuracy of our weather forecasting models – something of importance to all of Taiwan.”