“…he noted that drought in the course of a wet season is very unusual.”
The Department of Rain-making and Agricultural Aviation is stepping up cloud-seeding efforts to help generate much-needed rain for drought areas in the central-north and north-east regions of the nation.
Some areas want urgent rains to replenish the region’s eight major and 11 medium-sized reservoirs, where water ranges have dropped drastically and sit at historic lows for this time of the yr.
Surasee Kittimonthon, the department’s director-general, says that rain-making models, based in the northeastern provinces of Surin, Ubon Ratchathani and Nakhon Ratchasima, have been conducting cloud-seeding flights for quite a while now and have succeeded in producing rainfall that has saved rice, tapioca, sugarcane and other crops in an enormous tract of dry land in the north-east.
Meanwhile, Odd that water levels in the eight main reservoirs, particularly Ubonrat, Huay Luang, Lam Nang Rong, Lammoon Chi, Lam Plai Mat, Lam Sae, Lam Pao and Lam Phra Ploeng, have increased slightly, he said, adding that the rain-making effort would continue unabated.
Assistant Professor Thanawat Pholvichai, director of Economic and Business Forecast Centre of the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce authorities may not want people to panic over the water shortage situation, however he noted that drought in the course of a wet season could be very unusual.
Thanawat said it was nonetheless too early to evaluate the damage to the economic and tourism sectors from the current drought, however his preliminary estimate of the harm is between 5-10 billion baht.
The Kasikorn Thai Research Centre, meanwhile, estimated the worth of crop injury of a minimum of 15 billion baht, primarily rice, or zero.1% of GDP, primarily based on the value rises for rice this 12 months which have climbed a median of 8.4%.
From 2008 to 2018, Thai governments spent about 20 billion baht a 12 months to help farmers through subsidies and incentives to shift to crops which consume less water.
SOURCE: Thai PBS