Establishing a colour-coded, impact-oriented Early Warning System at Myanmar DMH – Lessons Learned

Following previous missions in 2015 and 2016 to assess the warning capabilities of DMH (National Meteorological and Hydrological Service (NMHS) of Myanmar), ZAMG was commissioned by WMO- in 2019 to jointly develop a Meteoalarm-type impact-oriented, colour-coded Early Warning System (EWS) with DMH. This task also included training for operational meteorologists and hydrologists to operate the EWS in collaboration with Gerald Fleming. Challenging framework conditions, such as poor internet connectivity, the COVID pandemic, withdrawal of an implementing partner and the military coup in February 2021 forced the team to conduct most activities online. Thanks to the commitment of all parties involved, the system successfully went live in early April 2022. This contribution focuses on challenges, success stories and lessons learned from this project, which could be of interest to development agencies working with other NMHSs.

Lessons learned include that lack of qualified ICT staff and appropriate ICT infrastructure as well as challenging framework conditions favour cloud-based solutions/external hosting of Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)-based warning systems. CAP editing tools need to be flexible enough yet user-friendly and be capable of accommodating requirements given by country-specific legislation and organizational structure of NMHSs. To successfully bridge the last mile of warning dissemination to end users, APIs need to be designed to meet the requirements of re-users, such as Google, IBM and others, in order that the warnings can be ingested into their systems. The WMO Register of Alerting Authorities plays a central role in registering and making authoritative sources of warning information discoverable. The paradigm change from simple text bulletins containing „What the weather will be” to issuing CAP alerts „What the weather will do“ takes energy and time. Stock phrases for damage descriptions and instructions (e.g. IFRC PAPE messages) could help to speed up this process. It is important to involve stakeholders such as DRM authorities from the beginning. Deriving warning criteria needs to be done in close collaboration with the NMHS in order to increase the acceptance of subsequent Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs). It is important to emphasize that it is better to start easy and upgrade at a later stage. In terms of zoning of warnings, geocodes (e.g. regions or districts) were preferred over drawing polygons, since they reflect administrative responsibilities of regional and local Civil Protection Authorities (CPAs). For the long-term uptake of CAP-enabled tools, not just technical help, but also training on warning concepts/how to populate CAP elements is needed (on-the-job training). This was successfully carried out in the monsoon season 2021 through daily briefings and guidance in the warning decision process. Feedback from meteorologists and hydrologists was collected and used to further customise the interfaces and functionalities of the warning system.