Note: I wrote this entry a couple of weeks before actually posting it.

I’ve been spending this past month in Thailand as part of a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. It’s both a cultural and vocational exchange, and you can read more about our experiences at the team’s blog.

Today (March 26th), I toured the Thai Meteorological Department, which is a division of Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology. I had a chance to see both their weather forecast office, as well as their seismology office. I thought I would write about some of the differences I observed between meteorology in America and meteorology in Thailand.

The first thing I saw when walking into the forecast office is a surface chart. Surface charts look pretty similar to the ones we use in America. There is slightly more information plotted at each surface location. I didn’t look closely enough to figure out exactly what the values were, but there were probably 2-4 additional variables plotted for each surface observation. Another difference I noticed (but only realized later on) was the lack of fronts being plotted. Lows and highs were plotted as usual, even using the typical red L and blue H instead of the Thai equivalent characters. But there weren’t any fronts plotted, which I find to be interesting. I wish I would have realized it earlier so I could have asked them about it. The surface plots are all done by hand, and I was surprised this was the case because they had plenty of good computing hardware that should have been able to do the job.

Speaking of hardware, most of the machines were running Windows, but I did see some Linux boxes there, and even an SGI box.

Next was the upper air charts, and these plots were quite a bit different. In America, upper air charts typically start with plotting the geopotential height, thus allowing you to interpolate the relative wind flow. The upper air charts in Thailand start with the wind flow, where meteorologists use the wind plots to generate streamlines, and from there you can deduce what the height contours would look like. After talking to another meteorologist here in Michigan, I learned that streamlines are used instead of isobars because of the lack of significant Coriolis Force in the tropics, so geostrophic balance doesn’t really apply and thus isobars on an upper-air chart are much less useful.

They capture vertical atmospheric profiles a couple times a day, just like in America. Instead of using a Skew-T chart, they use a slightly different chart. There are 11 upper air stations in Thailand (roughly the land area of the state of California), which gives a spread similar to that found in America.

Radar is one aspect that is sorely lacking in Thailand. They have some radar stations, but the coverage just isn’t there, so they typically use surface rain gauge observations to plot where it’s currently raining (what a novel idea! :-)). There are over 800 rain gauges currently spread about the country, so the map they showed me had a surprisingly high resolution, and showed actual precipitation data instead of estimated precipitation data. Unfortunately, a rain gauge doesn’t give you any kind of radial velocity data. This is less critical in the tropics, but can still come in handy while forecasting.

They have developed their own weather forecast model, but they also use the ECMWF, WRF, and 2 other Asian forecast models that I can’t think of at this time. NWP is used to plot the model output data, which you can view directly on their website.

Forecasts are issued 4 times a day, and the office I visited issues forecasts for the entire country of Thailand, as well as a couple of neighboring countries. There are roughly 15 meteorologists on staff in the forecast office, which is on the 11th floor of the building I visited.

It’s tough to find meteorologists to work there because there just aren’t many meteorology degrees offered in the country. One university offers a Masters degree in meteorology, and typically students will first get a bachelors in physics (or another hard science), before specializing in meteorology. Only about 20 meteorologists graduate each year from the program, so those students definitely have a good chance of finding a job after completing their studies.