Meet U Tun Lwin: Myanmar’s Favorite Weatherman

If you want to make it in the new Myanmar, it helps to have an anti-authoritarian streak and a knack for social media. Even, it turns out, if you’re in the weather business. U Tun Lwin, a onetime government bigwig who became the country’s favorite independent weather forecaster, works from his home in the commercial capital, Yangon.

“My story is very different from other people,” he said in crisp British English during a recent interview at his office, a spacious room kitted out with desks, couches and a clutch of framed degree certificates.

U Tun Lwin, now in his sixties, is a very well-known man in Myanmar. His forecasts appear in numerous newspapers and journals. He is sought after for TV appearances. Several paintings of his likeness hang on his walls. But you’ll find him, most of the time, on Facebook. Social media is an increasingly vital tool for communication in Myanmar, where more than half the population now owns a cell phone. The Minister for Information, Ye Htut,  posts so frequently that he is jokingly referred to as the Minister for Facebook.

U Tun Lwin’s tens of thousands of followers include farmers, fishermen and sailors. Each of his updates gets thousands of likes. On a recent morning, a woman responded to one of his posts with an urgent question. Her husband, a sailor, was headed to Taiwan, where she’d heard there was a typhoon. Should she be worried? 

“This typhoon is intensifying. You have the wrong information – the winds are 140mph. I think you’d better stay away from it,” he wrote. “Oh, thank you so much,” she typed back.

It’s a far cry from his life as head of the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology, where he worked for 45 years before crashing out in 2009 amid the aftermath of the worst natural disaster in Myanmar’s recent history. He started there in the 1960s as a teenager from a poor background. His father had left the family. His mother sold onions. The young U Tun Lwin drove her to the wholesale market each morning on his bicycle. They would arrive almost three hours early to try to get a reduction.

“I started to realize: to be poor is very bad. I have to work very hard to escape from it,” he said.

The way he tells it, U Tun Lwin rose through the ranks quickly. Initially he only took the position so he could work his way through university – first in Mandalay and later in the United States – but it became a job for life. Of all the government roles to have under the former ruling military junta, his wasn’t the most glamorous: the department was stretched and under-resourced.

 “Not abreast with the time – absolutely out of date,” he recalled. “Everything was manual, not automatic. All the instruments were conventional, most of them aging.”

Cyclone Nargis

After he was promoted to run the department in 2005, U Tun Lwin helped forge an alliance with regional governments to create an early warning system in response to the Asian tsunami, he said. As a result, he said, he was the first person in Myanmar to sound the alarm over Cyclone Nargis in late April, 2008. The storm, one of the most powerful on record claimed more than 140,000 lives, killed three-quarters of the country’s livestock and destroyed 700,000 homes.

When U Tun Lwin looked at the weather pattern, he saw Nargis was on course to sweep through the Irrawaddy Delta, a low-lying, impoverished area of the country. Storms that big didn’t usually hit the Delta. But the forecaster remembered one that had, in the 1970s. The damage it had caused was unparalleled.

“I was so worried – probably I was the only one worrying in the whole country!” he recalled.

In a Burmese language book published earlier this year, the forecaster set out his explanation of what happened in the days leading up to the cyclone. He said he called more than 300 people – all senior officials – up to the President’s office.

“I talked for almost five days. So if someone says they don’t know about the storm, I can’t accept it. Everybody knew. Especially the authorities. They knew very well.”

He places blame for devastation squarely on the government officials in charge of disaster response. Many had no idea what their responsibilities were, he said. 

“They just relayed the warning to the people but you cannot do like that,” said U Tun Lwin. “The most sure way to save lives is evacuation.”

That didn’t happen and, for nearly a month, the regime blocked visas for overseas aid workers. They refused vital aid supplies. Many died from preventable diseases.

 “The government system is very weak,” said U Tun Lwin. “No education. Never learn! When you work hard, and you learn hard, you will be the only one.”

Amid the finger-pointing that followed the storm, his department shouldered blame from both the government and the public.

“People do not know much about the activities of the government. But where storms and disasters are concerned, the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology is the only agency who is talking all the time.”

He argued with his boss, the then-minister for transport and communication and was pushed into an unplanned retirement.

“I was almost helpless,” he recalled. “I didn’t get the weather information. I didn’t get the weather data. But one lucky thing happened to me.”

Before the cyclone, he had been doing research as part of a television program about his work and had come across online forecasting tools provided by the World Meteorological Organization. The show never aired – because of pressure from his enemies within the government, U Tun Lwin believes – but the memory of the datasets resurfaced when he found himself unemployed. He decided to use them to keep forecasting and a few months later set up a website called Myanmar Climate Change Watch. He launched his Facebook page – which quickly became more popular than the website – within the year.

“It’s fantastic! I never realized Facebook could be so helpful to me," he said.

Infrastructure shortfalls mean his work – funded through paid TV appearances and newspaper columns – can sometimes be tough. In the early days, online connectivity was sometimes so poor that he was forced to work through the night, when the load on the network was lightest.

“As a Buddhist, I would say these are good deeds,” he said.

He still works 12 to 15 hour days, although his health is poor. But he doesn’t regret leaving the department.

“When you are in the government, there are many misplaced priorities,” he said, with a creaky laugh. “Now, as a freelancer, I feel very good. I live like a human now.”

Do people like him more now he is independent?

“I think so. People like me to be this way because they understand that I spend more time with them.”

In the department, meanwhile, there is a new boss. U Tun Lwin is close with some of his old colleagues – former students. They have a social media presence, too. “I hear they always look at my Facebook for instruction,” he said. In a strange reversal, the sixty-something hopes to transfer his online media skills to the “young ones.”

There will be challenging years ahead for Myanmar. The country is set to suffer some of the worst effects of climate change and it is woefully under-prepared. U Tun Lwin knows this. He has seen the changes in the weather. He has watched the rainy season get shorter and the droughts longer. “The future is not bright,” he said.“I cannot say what will happen – that is another story. As for me, I have to work to do my best and train the young generation. But I don’t look very far – just day to day.”