Kunlun meteorological station in the Antarctic File photo: China Meteorological Administration

China's Kunlun Station and Taishan Station in the Antarctic were officially put into operation on Wednesday. They will obtain long-term and continuous conventional meteorological observation data to effectively enhance China's forecasting capability for polar weather.

Wang Yi, a deputy director of the World Meteorological Centre Beijing office, said that the operation of automatic meteorological stations on the Antarctic ice sheet will further promote global weather forecasting. 

Low temperatures are key to the construction of automatic meteorological stations in the Antarctic continent. It has not been easy to build automatic meteorological stations there; it took five and nine years, respectively, to build and test Kunlun Station, located 4,093 meters above sea level and Taishan Station, 2,626 meters above sea level, before finally putting them into use.

During the trial period, the two stations worked stably and the data to report rate exceeded 99.58 percent and 99.73 percent, respectively, which exceeded the operational requirements of the country's basic weather stations, according to the China Meteorological Administration(CMA).

The lowest temperature on the Antarctic continent can reach -89.2 C and the wind speed could reach 100 meters per second. A long-term and regular meteorological monitoring mechanism increases China's weather forecasting capability in the polar areas, and has great significance to improve the accuracy of polar weather forecasting and climate change evaluation, according to the administration.

In 2018, China became the third country following Australia and the US to conduct continuous automatic meteorological observations in the ultra-low temperature areas of the Antarctic, according to the CMA.  

The Chinese Antarctic expedition team has set up several automatic meteorological stations along the route from Zhongshan Station to Kunlun Station. The Taishan meteorological station was built on December 24, 2012, and Kunlun meteorological station was built on January 6, 2017.  The observation data was transmitted to the National Arctic and Antarctic Data Center.