Song Lili, a prestigious scientist with the provincial weather bureau, said she and her colleagues had homed in the typhoon's center and obtained 1.72 million items of statistical information as Vongfeng landed at Wuchuan, Guangdong Province.

The wind speed one hour before the typhoon's arrival was 40 meters per second, the fastest velocity ever recorded by the monitor, but subsequently dropped to 20 meters per second when the typhoon arrived on the coast. It accelerated approximately 20 minutes after arrival but then gradually subsided, according to Song.

"This proves that we were precisely monitoring the eye of the storm as the force of the wind reduced slightly because the air in the typhoon's center tended to drop a little," said Song. "This rare valuable data will be of great importance in our future research."

Meanwhile, Chinese meteorologists also obtained a wealth of data from another monitoring station at Yangjiang, which is situated to the northeast of the typhoon center.

Prof. Zhou Mingyu, a noted atmospheric physicist and an ocean and atmospheric forecasting specialist with the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center, who was at Yangjiang, said that the tail of Vongfeng swept past the Yangjiang monitoring base and more significant data was collected.

"What we have so far obtained can be applied to the related work on the harnessing of energy and other fields. We will strive to use our research outcome in our automatic meteorological observatories at coastal areas so as to do a better job in monitoring the development and the routes of other typhoons in the future," said Zhou.

Meteorologists in the region will go on monitoring typhoons in years ahead to continue their research.

"Typhoon research is in full swing and we can never hinge on a single case for all the information we require. What is needed is to have more new material available to study," said He Xiajiang, also a distinguished meteorologist.

Research workers will present a study report on the current information late next year.

China is among the major countries which are most affected by grave typhoon disasters. A total of nine typhoons occurred last year resulting in 231 deaths and 17.65 billion yuan (US$2.13 billion) in economic losses.

(Xinhua News Agency August 24, 2002)