Soldiers carry the second body found buried under the mud and rocks in Taihe village, Chiayi county yesterday. CNA

TAIPEI: A wireless rainfall reporting system has been developed by a Taiwan research team. The system will help authorities issue more precise mudslide warnings and prevent a recurrence of tragedies which saw mountain villagers buried alive by unexpected landslides.

Researchers, describing the system yesterday, said the automatic rain measuring and reporting system can be deployed and maintained easily in remote mountainous regions at relatively low cost.

Taiwan still relies on volunteers to report rainfall levels recorded at various precipitation gauge stations, at the present time. It's on the basis of those volunteer reports that meteorologists issue landslide warnings.

"The new system does not need humans to operate it. It can easily transmit rainfall information back to the central control system or the Central Weather Bureau," King Chung-ta, a professor at National Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science said.

King, who played a key role in the development of the wireless rain gauge reporting system, said the system can also be linked to Google Map or Microsoft's Sensor Map to display real-time rainfall data at specific locations.

The key to the system lies in using multi-hop transmission technology to overcome the possible inaccessibility of mobile phone services, King explained.

"Aided by multi-hop routing, the system can deliver rainfall data to a base station from where the data can be turned into short messages for delivery to the central control center to help it more accurately forecast landslides," King explained.

Because the equipment and the installation cost of the new system are both cheaper than the cost of setting up traditional precipitation collection stations, King argued that the new system should be deployed extensively in the 1,500 areas around Taiwan vulnerable to mudslides.

"By doing so, we can collect more comprehensive rainfall data to help local meteorologists make more precise weather forecasts and mudslide alerts," King said.

That would prevent having hundreds of people buried alive in mudslides in remote mountainous villages as occurred earlier this month in Kaohsiung county after Typhoon Morakot dumped a staggering amount of rainfall in the area.

While the Central Weather Bureau accurately predicted the coming of the typhoon, critics said the bureau fell short in offering timely mudslide alerts in potentially vulnerable areas.

The research team, composed of researchers from National Tsinghua University and Feng Chia University, began developing the system three years ago.

King said the team has developed a prototype which has proven effective in trials on the Feng Chia University campus and at other outdoor locations.

"We hope the government can cooperate with the industrial sector to mass produce this new equipment and deploy it extensively to enhance the accuracy of landslide warnings," he said, adding that the cost for mass producing the device is estimated at no more than NT$2,000 ($60.6) a piece.

China Daily/CNA

(HK Edition 08/27/2009 page2)