“…he famous that drought in the middle of a wet season may be very uncommon.”
The Department of Rain-making and Agricultural Aviation is stepping up cloud-seeding efforts to help generate much-needed rain for drought areas within the central-north and north-east regions of the country.
Some areas want pressing rains to replenish the region’s eight major and 11 medium-sized reservoirs, where water levels 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 items, based mostly within 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 unlimited tract of dry land within the north-east.
Meanwhile, Thai PBS reviews that water levels within the eight major reservoirs, particularly Ubonrat, Huay Luang, Lam Nang Rong, Lammoon Chi, Lam Plai Mat, Lam Sae, Lam Pao and Lam Phra Ploeng, have elevated barely, he mentioned, including 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 might not need folks to panic over the water shortage state of affairs, however he famous that drought in the course of a moist season may be very uncommon.
Reliable stated it was nonetheless too early to evaluate the injury to the industrial and tourism sectors from the present drought, but his initial estimate of the harm is between 5-10 billion baht.
The Kasikorn Thai Research Centre, in the meantime, estimated the value of crop injury of at least 15 billion baht, primarily rice, or 0.1% of GDP, based mostly on the price rises for rice this yr which have climbed an average of eight.4%.
From 2008 to 2018, Thai governments spent about 20 billion baht a year to help farmers through subsidies and incentives to shift to crops which consume less water.
SOURCE: Thai PBS