Thailand plans atmospheric studies, without Nasa

The project by local scientists would take six to nine months.

Thais would benefit from the cloud and atmospheric data, he said, as it would make weather forecasting more accurate and help with national water management.

Despite the cancellation of some parts of the project, opting to fund this work would boost confidence among Asean countries and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), he said.

Plodprasop’s comments came after Thai scientists from five institutions – Chulalongkorn University, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, the Thailand Research Fund, the Southeast Asia START Regional Research Centre and the Centre of Excellence for Climate Change Knowledge Management – set new guidelines and goals after Nasa was not able to join in the atmospheric study project.

Dr Anon Sanitwong na Ayutthaya said the five-agency meeting decided the project should go ahead. Thai scientists had the capacity to study the available material and co-operate with Asean countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

He said studies about dust in the atmosphere and cloud creation due to human activities – such as the burning of biogenic aerosols and industrial dust – would help make weather forecasting more accurate.

Anon said they would employ land and sea tools as well as several satellites – the Thaichote or Thailand Earth observation system (THEOS), the Terra MODIS, and Kasetsart University’s small multi-mission satellite (SMMS) to gather data on clouds.

The Royal Rainmaking Centre’s Super King Air aircraft would be equipped with devices to detect radiation, collect dust samples, gather light and humidity data at 10-kilometres above the ground, instead of Nasa’s ER2 aircraft, he said. Although it couldn’t fly as high as the ER2, the obtained data should be good enough, he said. Cloud-data balloons would be used along with ground stations and sea-surveying ships.

Dust from bio-mass burning would be studied this month and next, he said. Researchers would also collect data at southern peat swamp forests and study the impact of forest fires from neighbouring countries. 

From February-March, they would go north to collect dust samples from forest fires, farm clearing and study their impact from Laos and China, he said.

Information obtained would be published for the use of interested agencies, Anon said.

Thailand lacked data-analysis tools, like high-performance computers, to create models, he admitted. But the long-term plan was to set up an agency to support academic work, he said. 

A meeting would be held in one month for Thai scientists to exchange ideas, while a cooperative network of young students, such as Globe, and the Lesa network, Mahidol Wittayanusorn School, would be created to provide undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships, he added.