Impact of Afternoon Thunderstorms on the Land-Sea Breeze in the Taipei Basin during Summer: An Experiment

Environmental conditions for the roughly three million people living in the Taipei basin of Taiwan are greatly affected by the land sea breeze and afternoon thunderstorm activities. A new perspective on the land sea breeze life cycle and how it is affected by afternoon thunderstorm activity in the Taipei basin during the dry season is provided. During the summer monsoon break revival phase, about 75% of rainfall in the Taipei basin is produced by afternoon thunderstorms triggered by sea-breeze interactions with the mountains to the south of this basin. Because the basic characteristics of the land sea breeze and the changes it undergoes through the influence of afternoon thunderstorms have not been comprehensively analyzed/documented, a mini field experiment was conducted during the summers of 2004 and 2005 to explore these aspects of the land sea breeze in this basin. Thunderstorm rainfall is found to change not only the basin's land sea-breeze life cycle, but also its ventilation mechanism. On the nonthunderstorm day, the sea breeze supplies the open-sea fresh air for about 8 h during the daytime, but the land breeze persists on the thunderstorm day from afternoon to the next morning, acting to sweep polluted urban air out of the basin.