At the 29th Meeting of the ASEAN Sub-Committee on Meteorology and Geophysics (SCMG) which was held in Manila on 17-19 July 2007, ASEAN Member Countries agreed to further expand its cooperation to address tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclone, known as typhoon which hits tropical areas, has been recognised as one of the major causes of natural disaster in the region. Future cooperation activities in this field will focus on the technical aspects pertaining to its monitoring and efforts to mitigate the adverse impacts. It is expected that this new initiative will lead to a closer cooperation with the UNESCAP/WMO Typhoon Committee and similar organisations.

In the area of meteorology, the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Center (ASMC) will continue its service in issuing weather related information and training activities including the use of MODIS data from EOS Terra and Aqua Satellite and the calibration and fine tune of the existing HYSPLIT model. The ASMC has also been generating useful products for regional haze monitoring.

At the Meeting, new initiatives were also put forward by the ASEAN Member Countries in the area of geophysics to implement activities in support of the ASEAN’s effort to build the Tsunami Early Warning Systems currently underway in some countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The Tsunami Technical Task Force will continue to meet to discuss the progress of the establishment of the Systems and to address issues pertaining to data and information exchange. The ASEAN Earthquake Information Centre (AEIC) will coordinate the activities of the Technical Task Force. The AEIC has been disseminating earthquake information to all ASEAN countries and organised several training activities.

More new joint activities are expected to be implemented under the ASEAN cooperation with several Dialogue Partners such as China, Japan and ROK and international organisations such as WMO and IOC-UNESCO. One such project is the workshop on aviation meteorology which will be implemented under the SCMG and Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) in 2008.

Representatives of the China Earthquake Administration, Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), IOC-UNESCO and WMO were also present at the Meeting.

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