Assoc Professor Dr Thanawat Jaruphongsakul said the money should be used to buy weather-monitoring radar to track cloud patterns, a practice that had been adopted internationally.

The money would also better spent on building weather stations to measure rainwater volume in 2,700 villages at risk of landslides. "No warning system for flash- floods or landslides exists anywhere in the world," said Thanawat, a geology lecturer with Chulalongkorn University's science faculty.

The academic was responding to news caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had approved the construction of a network of monitoring and warning systems - for the North - at the request of caretaker Deputy PM Suwat Liptapanlop.

Thanawat said the Meteorological Department and National Disaster Warning Centre, under the Department of Mineral Resources, should coordinate more closely to cope with the likelihood of natural disasters, which seem to be becoming more frequent in Southeast Asia.

Assoc Professor Dr Wisut Baimai, a project manager at the Biodiversity Research and Training Programme (BRT), said the structural damage in areas ravaged in Uttaradit, Sukhothai and Phrae would require decades of natural or man-made restoration to return them to their original environmental and biologically-diverse conditions.

Citing BRT research, he said the flash-floods were partly caused by a drastic change of biodiversity - when uninhabited jungles were transformed into plantations and farmland.