Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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CHIANG MAI WEATHER GOES OFF THE GRAPH - AGAIN!!

Text & Images: John Cadet

Well, I give you due warning - I'm a native of those foggy islands off the coast of mainland Europe, about which the US comedian Bob Hope said, "It's the only place I know that has four seasons in one day."

That's right, the British Isles, otherwise known as the United Kingdom - truly united in perhaps only one particular, an obsession with the weather.

The point I'm making is that I've brought this obsession about the weather with me, and found in most of Southeast Asia, and Chiang Mai especially, there's not a lot to feed it on.

Up until the last couple of years, at any rate.

It's true we have our weather up here. Cool couple of months before and after the New Year: an uncomfortably hot and increasingly humid two to three months up to May-June: then the monsoon rains increasing in volume and frequency to their August-September maxima, followed by the rapid tapering off taking us back to the cool, dry 'winter'.

There are minor variations within this pattern, of course, but these apart, there's really nothing to write home about.

So at least you could have said until recently, when a couple of extraordinary weather-events rewrote the record books.

According to data from the Northern Meteorological Office, at the end of 2002, Chiang Mai had the most extraordinary breach of its hardly-varying weather pattern in the fifty-six years since record-keeping began.

Man-made disasters, Asian Brown Cloud and Indonesian fires.

As I say, the rainy season normally has a slow, rather uncertain build up, but a swift tapering off. Chiang Mai gets its maximum falls in August and September. That's to say, nearly 40% of the year's rain comes in these two monsoon months.

But following this, in the North at least, there's usually a day in the middle of October when the whole weather pattern perceptibly does an about turn, instead of the weather coming hot and humid from the Indian Ocean, suddenly Yunnan, Southern China and points even further north, are breathing cooler air all over us - not a cloud to be seen from horizon to horizon. Winter isn't here yet, but it's on its way.

At least, that's how it's more or less been since the records began, but then came 2002.

Nothing out of the ordinary for the first ten months. Temperature, humidity, pressure, daily maxima/minima, cloud cover etc: just what the averages would lead you to expect - and rainfall too. By the end of October there'd been a total for the year of 1,164 mm, and if most of October's rain had come close to the end rather than the beginning of the month - well, variations do occur and this apparently was one of them.

But then came November, and normality suddenly took a back-seat. In the first three days of the month, 162.3 mm of rain came tumbling out of a weirdly concocted cloudscape, giving what was already three times the monthly average. Then on the 17th, after thirteen days of zero rainfall, another 114.6 mm fell within the 24 hours, with three more days of rain at the end of the month bringing the total to 332.3 mm, seven and a half times the monthly average, and an all time record at almost exactly twice as much as the next highest total of 164.7 mm, in November 1972.

Well, so much for that, you might have thought, coming up for air. But wait a minute, there's December to get through. After January the second coolest month, and after January, February and March, the next driest, December has an average of 17 mm of rain, and frequently none at all. Not a trace recorded in 2000 and 2001, for example.

Well, if you take out the 9th and the 25th of the month, that's almost exactly what we got - 0.8 of a mm. But on those two exceptional days the heavens again opened, unloading a total of 116.3 mm in 48 hours, once more an all-time record and nearly seven times the fifty-one year average for the month.

The total for the year, then, at 1,611.2 mm was the second highest of all (recorded) time.

"So!", you're going to say. "One swallow doesn't make a summer, and one extremely unusual year of rainfall doesn't indicate a pattern that's no longer valid."

But what has just happened in the 2006 - 07 dry season appears to indicate that if the overall weather pattern in Chiang Mai is still holding, extreme variations outside it are becoming more frequent.

Now, during the dry season, roughly mid-October to mid-March, it's unusual but not unprecedented for absolutely no rain to fall for four consecutive months. It happened in 1979 - 80, for example, November to February. It happened again in 1982-3, this time from December to March. However, this last dry season outdid every other since records were first kept. The last day of rain before the dry season began was 12th October 2006. From then for the rest of that month, and through the five - repeat five - succeeding months - November to March inclusive - not even a trace of rain was recorded at the Northern Meteorological Station at Chiang Mai airport. In fact the first fall occurred only on April 18th, which meant there'd been no rain for an unprecedented total of 187 consecutive days, more than half a year.

In other words, in the five and a half decades that records have been kept, Chiang Mai has had one quite extraordinary out-of-kilter rainy season, and a less spectacular but none-the-less record-breaking drought, both occurring within the last five years.

Now in accounting for these weather anomalies - and extrapolating as to what they might mean for the weather to come - the usual suspects cited are: the Greenhouse Effect, Global Warming, El Nino (and his little sister El Nina), the Indonesian forest fires, deforestation of the region in general and Thailand in particular, and the Asian Brown Cloud…

"The what" you're going to say at this point.

Well, what the weather experts are telling us is that for the last twenty years a thick soup of man-made pollutants some two miles high and covering 10 million square miles has been spreading throughout the atmosphere, mainly over South and SE Asia. Composed of industrial and vehicular particulates, as well as carbon monoxide, and ash and soot from cooking fires and the burning of vegetation, it produces unfortunate side effects, blocking off sunlight by up to 15%, reducing photosynthesis and giving rise - here we go! - to 'weather extremes': out-of-season storms, deluges and droughts al la 2002 / 2005-7 in Chiang Mai. And what they're further saying is that if we want to get back to something closer to weather normality, we'd better stop doing the silly things we've been doing recently that makes life so much harder for all of us. Or else…

And they've got a point. I'm as weather-obsessed as the next Brit., but what I like being obsessed by are the variations, not these altogether scarier anomalies. Additionally, just recently there have been some appalling readings of air pollution in Chiang Mai during the dry season. This is when, in addition to the 'normal' city-wide garbage burning and the toxins being pumped into the atmosphere by cars and planes, fields and forests get set on fire, the lack of wind at this time helping to raise the MP 10 count as much as three times above the safety level.

Reason enough, I should have thought, for us to be sending urgent messages to our elected representatives to get out of their sand pits and start paying attention to the things around that really matter to us, climate change and air quality control certainly not the least among them.

After all, Come to Chiang Mai, Lung-Cancer Capital of Southeast Asia! doesn't have quite the promotional ring that will draw in and keep the tourists coming, so let's hope the agencies concerned, the Tourism Authority, the major hoteliers, the municipal and provincial authorities among them - not to speak of the rest of us citizenry - are going to see the urgency of the need to do something effective…