Capacity building in SE Asia (2011-2022)

Bangladesh, Myanmar and Vietnam are among the countries in Southeast Asia that are most exposed to natural disasters. Dangerous weather leads to annual loss of life and property damage, often of significant magnitude. The culture of prevention is partly poorly developed in these countries. In this context, good weather forecasting and climate services are important elements.

In this project, the MET Norway is collaborating with the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), with the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) in Myanmar and VietNam Meteorologial and Hydrological Administration (VNMHA) in Vietnam.

The project started in 2011 as a collaboration with BMD but was expanded in 2012 to include DMH and VNMHA.

These institutions have the national responsibility for weather forecasting and climate services in their respective countries. Based on their needs, and in collaboration with them, our common goal is to increase the quality of weather forecasting and climate services, strengthen the countries' 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 project aims to improve the partner institutions capabilities to provide useful services to both public administration and the general population.

The overall goal is to reduce risk from disasters caused by climate change and extreme weather for the population of Bangladesh, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The partner institutions work together to enhance the capacity for producing, distributing and evaluating forecasts and warnings at the partner institutions. These activities are intra-dependent and equally important and apply to atmospheric, ocean and wave forecasts. In Bangladesh and Myanmar there is also a particular focus on developing climate statistics for recent decades, while in Vietnam, significant resources are used on mitigation of marine disasters (storm surge, oil spill and shipwrecks).

Myanmar: All state to state cooperation was put on hold after the military coup in februar 2021


For Bangladesh in 2022 we focus on:

  • Further investigate and co-produce video tutorials and user manuals for open source weather forecasting tools like Diana, Tseries and statistical tools like R and Empirical Statistical Downscaling (ESD).
  • Continue to customize Diana for the benefit of BMD , for example introducing streamlines into Diana for better weather analysis in areas closer to equator.
  • Working with products for Aviation Weather on request from BMD
  • Continue to develop a Diana user manual and application user interface in Bengali.
  • Improving skills for statistical analysis of climate data and climate projections
  • Continued work on downscaled climate scenarios for Bangladesh, based on Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) og CMIP6
  • Continue work on verification of weather forecasts and training in the R library harp for verification.
  • Explore possibilities of MET Norway weather api for the use in BMD weather Services

Plante risPlanting of rice


fra Mekong elvenFrom Mekong river

For Vietnam in 2022 we focus on:

  • Start developing larger domains for ocean and wave models for improved support to Myanmar and Bangladeshin addition to the Vietnam areas
  • Develop more streamlined scripts for verification of wave satellite products.
  • Improve the graphical user interface of OpenDrift.
  • An enhanced use of probability forecasting and EPS (Ensemble Prediction System) at VNMHA, particularly for storm surge