ICIWaRM Cosponsors Third ASEAN Academic Network Technical Training Workshop for Water and Disaster Management

In the wake of heavy flooding in Southern Thailand in early January, water scientists and policy-makers from ASEAN member states gathered in Bangkok to promote capacity building in using satellite-based rainfall estimation products to plan for and manage water-related natural disasters as well as to strengthen research collaboration through the ASEAN academic network.

PERSIANN-CCS rain totals 1-10 Jan 2017. Photo credit: Phu Nguyen, UC-Irvine.

The third ASEAN technical workshop on “CHRS [Centre for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing] Remote Sensing Precipitation and Bias Adjustment of PERSIANN-CCS [Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks Cloud Classification System] Estimation for Water and Disaster Management” was held from 24-26 January at Chulalongkorn University.

The workshop was sponsored by UNESCO-Bangkok and UNESCO’s Global Network on Water and Development Information for Arid Lands (G-WADI); ICIWaRM is the technical secretariat on G-WADI. The UNESCO Chair in Water Disaster Management and Climate Change (Faculty of Engineering at Chulalongkorn University) hosted and co-sponsored the event, which was attended by 53 participants from Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam.

Professors Kuo-Lin Hsu and Phu Nguyen of the University of California, Irvine gave hands-on training in the use and bias adjustment of PERSIANN-CCS, a real-time, satellite-based precipitation estimation product and PERSIANN-CDR, a Climate Data Record which provides rainfall data from 1983 to almost the present day. They also demonstrated other products from the PERSIANN family, such as RainSphere and the iRain smartphone app.

A more detailed write-up of this event may be found at the UNESCO Bangkok office website here.