Myanmar is approximately two times Norway’s area, has a long and vulnerable coastline, and a population of about 55 million people. Myanmar is exposed to a number of natural disasters, such as tropical cyclones, extreme rainfall/monsoons, floods, landslides, storm surge and earthquakes.
In Myanmar, we worked in the project “Institutional support and capacity building for mitigation of weather and climate hazards in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Vietnam”. The project started in 2012 and was funded by Norad.
We were collaborating with the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) which is the national meteorological institute of Myanmar. DMH has the national responsibility for weather forecasting and climate services in Myanmar. Based on their needs, and in collaboration with them, our common goal was to increase the quality of weather forecasting and climate services, strengthen the country's preparedness and prevention capacity in relation to the forces of nature, and improve the ability to adapt important national infrastructure to climate change. The climate challenges in the region are great and the measures aimed to make the partner institutions in the best possible position to provide useful services to both public administration and the general population.
In Myanmar we worked with the tools Diana, Tseries, R and harp.
The collaboration with DMH focused on the implementation and use of open source weather forecasting tools, training of meteorologists, wave forecasting, use of statistics and verification and climate knowledge.
After the military coup in February 2021 The Norwegian government decided that Norway is freezing the state-to-state knowledge-development programs between public institutions in Norway and Myanmar. This project is on-hold for the time being.
Another project in Myanmar, is the WMO project: "WMO Technical Assistance for the Modernization of the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH)". This project continues as a cooperation between MET Norway and WMO. In this project, the main goal was for DMH to be able to use Diana with more functionality than what has been the case so far. With help from the World Bank, DMH is building a new data center where many types of weather data will be available for Diana. This project has been delayed due to the Covid pandemic and the military coup. It was closed in March 2022 and unfortunately was not completed.
Map of Myanmar
Workshop at DMH
Kelp harvesting on the Inle Lake
