Rain Maps for Bangkok and Central Thailand

With all the news about the floods at the moment, its only natural that we are a bit more curious about the weather than we normally are. Lots of us want to know what it has got in store for us over the coming days. Two websites that I have been addicted to recently have been very useful in predicting when it is going to rain. The first one (above) is Rain Radar and it is released by the Department of Drainage and Sewerage. It says it is updated every 10 minutes. The second one (below) is Thai Rain Map and was developed by an expat living in Bangkok called Jan (@bm_). His one is updated every 30 minutes.

As you can see, Jan’s map shows more of the rain while the rain radar only shows heavy storms. He also uses a google map which means you can zoom in and out and switch between road map and satellite image. He tweeted this afternoon that the rain map “now has a wind vector which gets updated a few times per day from aeronautical data”. My only criticism is that his map doesn’t update automatically. However, the rain radar does that for you. Jan tells me that he is working on new improvements at the moment and hopefully an automatic refresh will be forthcoming.

The official website for the Thai Meteorological Department is here. If you have any favourite weather web sites for Thailand please let me know in the comments.