Location
Locating in the deformation fronts, the intensive land processes have created landscape diversity over the island of Taiwan. The land processes and geomorphology associate with climate variations, land-use dynamics, and water resources allocation can further enhance the complexity of land surface water, heat, and mass interactions. Reservoir Shihmen has been operated for over 50 years and is located upstream of Daham River. A total of 55% reservoir outflow is allocated out of the Daham River Basin to support irrigation and industrial/domestic water usages at the Taoyuan tableland. The trans-basin water allocation and thousands of irrigation ponds over the Taoyuan tableland create unique landscape characteristics in northern Taiwan. Such intensively managed landscapes, regions of significant land-use change, serve as sources of economic prosperity. However, the intensity of land-use change is responsible for the unintended deterioration of our land and water environments. Understanding the dynamics of water, heat, and mass interactions and dynamics in the area is fundamental to clarify the influences of climate variations and land use activity on land surface processes.
The TaiCoast site is the second observatory established for our NCU Atmospheric and Hydrological Observatories (NAHOs) to provide testing and practicing of different monitoring techniques for transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies.
The location of the TaiCoast site is suited between the developed coast area and the paddy/pond area. We established a variety of monitoring capacities, including atmospheric, hydrological, and geophysical measurements, to support transdiciplinary critical zone studies with real-time field observations.
