100 Chinese Balloon Since Early December 2023

Weather Intelligence Collection For What? Surfing?

Jan 02, 2024

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Chinese Balloons Fly Over Taiwan at 30,000 Feet

Normal or Abnormal?

By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德

TAIPEI - The number of Chinese balloons since early December has now hit 100.

I have already written extensively on these recent balloons (HERE).

December 2023 was the first time Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) began reporting Chinese balloons flying over the island itself. In the past, most have fallen into the Taiwan Strait with no reports by the MND.

To put this in perspective, the Taipei Weather Station deploys a weather balloon at 0700 and 1900 (from Banchiao, New Taipei City), but Chinese weather stations under the National Meteorological Information Centre (NMIC) number 131 stations, including the one they claim in Taipei (which is open-source data from Taipei’s Weather Station).

A Taiwan military source said that Chinese balloons are quite common and are launched from two mainland stations.

“The Ministry of National Defense believes that these reports will prove to the public that Taiwan’s radars, particularly the early warning radars (EWR), are accurately spotting and tracking these balloons.”
Also there is a real fear that withholding the information from the public might eventually reflect badly on the MND if one of these balloons crashes on the island and the public demands answers, the source said.
MND releases the tracks in aggregate (0600-0600 next day). Balloons usually deploy twice per day (0700, 1900) per station. So it's 4 balloons/day from 2 stations, at this weather pattern recently.”