November 22, 2007	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 11, 1428

NEW ORLEANS: Working on a laptop computer in a Florida hotel, Louisiana State University hurricane expert Hassan Mashriqui got down to business: He simulated and computed what kind of damage Tropical Cyclone Sidr would wreak on his native country of Bangladesh.

It was noon, Nov 14. Four hours later, Mashriqui e-mailed the modeling he had run on Sidr to Bangladeshi officials. It was not good news: Sidr would create storm surge of up to 12 feet.

The forecast raised the “highest possible red flag,” Mashriqui said.

“I was told that the secretary who was making (evacuation) decisions got that through personal delivery,” Mashriqui said of his forecast. “And they say it helped them quickly decide how to evacuate, where to evacuate.”

Sidr would strike about 15 hours later, killing more than 3,150 people.

That the storm surge modelling, provided by a Bangladeshi-born researcher from half a world away, illustrates how developing nations often do not have the forecasting tools now customary in the United States and other wealthy nations.

“Places like Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka have weather agencies, but to my knowledge actually don’t run models,” said Kerry Emanuel, the author of “Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes”.

“So nobody’s providing them the kind of guidance they need except, as we’ve seen, on an ad hoc basis,” said Emanuel, who teaches tropical meteorology and climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mashriqui was the epitome of ad hoc.

“I was monitoring (the cyclone) as I was on the plane, and as I ran to my hotel room,” said Mashriqui, a 42-year-old coastal engineer born in Dhaka. He had flown from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to an oil spill conference in Tampa, Forida.

“I had a network connection to my laptop from the hotel room; I checked in at 12 o’clock and I finished this (model) run sitting at my hotel around 4 o’clock.”

In the meantime, he said he had been on the telephone with family members in Dhaka to find out how the Bangladeshi media was handling the storm and, through friends in Baton Rouge, he let the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management, the agency in charge of evacuations and relief, know that he was working on the modeling.

In an e-mail, Emaduddin Ahmad, the executive director of Bangladesh’s government-run hydraulics agency, the Institute of Water Modelling, praised Mashriqui’s forecast.

“I must say the findings matched quite well with the reality,” Ahmad said. “This gives us high confidence on the modeling capability of these natural disasters ... I believe, we need to house the knowledge and improve it for further refinement.”

Mashriqui faults the World Meteorological Organisation for not doing more modeling for the Bay of Bengal, even though Bangladesh has been hit by some of the worst cyclones in history. About 300,000 people were killed in the Bhola cyclone of 1970 and a cyclone in 1991 killed about 138,000 people.

“They actually never picked up the Bay of Bengal as an area that is a hot spot,” Mashriqui said. “It is very underserved.”

The World Meteorological Organisation — a branch of the United Nations that studies weather, climate and the oceans — did not respond on Tuesday to questions about the Bay of Bengal.

Emanuel, the MIT professor, said the forecasting gaps are too glaring for huge portions of the world’s coastlines, many of which are poor and becoming more populated. He said the World Meteorological Organisation needs to do more to serve those nations.

“I advocate that the World Meteorological Organisation establish a single magnificent forecasting operation somewhere — it could be Hawaii, it could be any place practically — that’s charged with collecting the data, running the models, for forecasting hurricanes around the globe,” Emanuel said.—AP