Thailand plays a central economic and policy-making role in Southeast Asia. Although climate change adaptation is being mainstreamed in Thailand, a well-organized overview of the impacts of climate change and potential adaptation measures has been unavailable to date. Here we present a comprehensive review of climate-change impact studies that focused on the Thai water sector, based on a literature review of six sub-sectors: riverine hydrology, sediment erosion, coastal erosion, forest hydrology, agricultural hydrology, and urban hydrology. Our review examined the long-term availability of observational data, historical changes, projected changes in key variables, and the availability of economic assessments and their implications for adaptation actions. Although some basic hydrometeorological variables have been well monitored, specific historical changes due to climate change have seldom been detected. Furthermore, although numerous future projections have been proposed, the likely changes due to climate change remain unclear due to a general lack of systematic multi-model and multi-scenario assessments and limited spatiotemporal coverage of the study area. Several gaps in the research were identified, and ten research recommendations are presented. While the information contained herein contributes to state-of-the-art knowledge on the impact of climate change on the water sector in Thailand, it will also benefit other countries on the Indochina Peninsula with a similar climate.

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The objective of this study was to investigate climate based observation and satellite based indices in order to monitor agricultural drought in Thailand and to study the effect of agricultural indices on major economic crops. Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and remotely sensed Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) were introduced to observe drought in the central region of Thailand. Integration of SPI and VCI has demonstrated the potential of geospatial technology to analyze and identify agricultural drought areas in macro scale at near-real time. The spatial analysis of 3-month SPI distribution indicates that it was the largest area of exceptional and extremely drought in 2010. VCI time series can be used to monitor vegetation condition correlating with moisture condition and landuse type. The frequency, area extent and severity of drought assessed from SPI and VCI could be benefit for the development of mitigation strategies of drought events.

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