Toshiba to supply Taiwan with system to aid storm tracking

The Japanese company with its partners will install an S-band weather radar system with an antenna in Chigu district, Tainan city. 
The system will be delivered by Toshiba with High Bound, a Taiwanese engineering company, under an order received from GECI Group (GECI), a Spanish system integration and technology company.
The system will have a range of about 400 kilometres and support high resolution imaging of rain and wind velocity, essential for accurate, weather forecasting. Toshiba, High Bound and GECI will deliver the system in 2019.
The western Pacific, long known as Typhoon Alley, is home to some of the world’s strongest tropical cyclones, including the strongest recorded, Typhoon Tip. 
Taiwan is regularly hit by typhoons, such as Nepartak, which made landfall in July 2016, causing extensive damage and claiming three lives. As a mountainous island where torrential rains can quickly result in landslides and flooding, Taiwan must be constantly ready to deal with the risk of such disasters, Toshiba said. The deployment of Toshiba’s S-band radar will make a major contribution to the island’s state of readiness, it said. 
The radar system “adopts dual polarisation technology and uses Toshiba’s microwave transistors to deliver wide-area observation and achieve high-level observation capabilities and accuracy”, the company said.
. The system also integrates several redundant microwave transistors to maintain operation if some of them fail. Toshiba received the order following GECI’s technical review and price evaluating.
Masaki Haruyama, vice president of the defence and electronic systems division in Toshiba’s Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Company said: “We are very pleased to have received our first order for a weather radar system for Taiwan. We are confident the system will contribute to advancing weather observation capabilities and the provision of timely, reliable forecasts.”
In addition to S-band weather radars for wide-area observations, Toshiba also provides X-band dual polarisation transportable Doppler weather radar systems for more localised monitoring. The company is focused on expanding sales of these systems in countries where severe weather is a concern and disaster prevention systems are needed, including India and Southeast Asian region.