Wind Engineering in Southeast Asia

I have mentioned that I attended the recent 7th Asia-Pacific Conference on Wind Engineering (APCWE7) in Taiwan, which is one of the regional conferences of the International Association for Wind Engineering (IAWE).

The IAWE as you know is an umbrella organisation composed of national/regional wind engineering societies such as the UK Wind Engineering Society (UK-WES), American Association for Wind Engineering (AAWE), Australasian Wind Engineering Society (AWES), and so on.

During such regional conferences, there is a regional assembly meeting of representatives from different wind engineering societies in the region. For this APCWE, the meeting was attended by representatives from member organisations of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong (China), Chinese Taipei, and India, as well as by some officers of the IAWE.

As you will notice, there are no representatives from Southeast Asian countries; there are no formal wind engineering societies and very few practicing wind engineers in Southeast Asia.

However, myself, being from the Philippines, as well as colleagues from Malaysia and Thailand were fortunate to be invited to the regional assembly meeting as observers. The IAWE officers and the regional assembly attendees encouraged us to form a Southeast Asian wind engineering group if it is difficult to form one in individual countries.

After the assembly meeting, we started discussing the idea of forming a wind engineering group with other Southeast Asian colleagues (from Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam) who also attended the APCWE7 and/or the APEC-WW workshop held after the conference. We all agreed it would benefit all of us in Southeast Asia.

We have now started an adhoc/informal group, to gather together individuals from or working in Southeast Asia with a wind engineering background, and from which, hopefully, we could start a more formal wind engineering group (or groups) in the future.

If you or anyone you know who are from or in Southeast Asia who has done work or is currently working in the field of wind engineering and interested to join, FYI, we have an adhoc website (http://ASEANwind.blogspot.com/). You can find more information there. We now also have an adhoc e-group/mailing list; to subscribe to the e-group/mailing list, you can send an e-mail to ASEANwind-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.