MANILA, Philippines -- When typhoon "Ramil" hits the country by the middle of this week, a number of the state weather bureau's forecasting will be undergoing an intensive seminar on the latest weather forecasting software from Australia.

Talk about good timing.

"Yes, we might even use ?Ramil? as an actual example, as it happens," Todd Smith of the Australian government's Bureau of Meteorology told reporters on Monday.

Smith is in the country for a two-week training seminar for some 40 meteorologists, researchers, and technical staff of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) on the use of the P20 million (AUD 500,000) worth of software upgrade for faster cyclone forecasting.

The upgrade is part of a collaboration between PAGASA and AusAID, the Australian government's Overseas Aid Program that began in late 2008, said Smith, manager of the Climate Services Centre of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia.

With this training PAGASA is set to shift to the "TC Module," the same software being used by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology for the last seven years, in forecasting tropical cyclones.

"The software is designed to assist the forecasters to make the process [of forecasting] faster and also has some features, which will improve the forecasting track or movement of the cyclone," Smith explained.

While PAGASA has been using a similar consensus approach, Smith said that the system "is not as formalized as what the TC Module can give."

"They (PAGASA forecasters) will need to look at the computer models that are available and simulate that on auxiliary charts where they draw in the tracks and then, they do a subjective consensus of those. So it's a similar process but takes a lot of time to plot the tracks on the chart then do the consensus," he said.

With the TC Module, Smith said that PAGASA's meteorologists would be able to save at least an hour in forecasting typhoons.

"That's very important because that allows the forecaster to spend more time to get the satellite picture, look at the weather charts and analyze the situation better," Smith said.

He added that the TC Module, which became "more sophisticated, faster, and powerful" in the last two years, could also produce nicer graphical images, which would hopefully enable people to understand them better.

"The TC module can produce maps like that to show where the typhoon has been, where it is going, the uncertainty in the forecast. Usually there's a grey area around the forecast track," Smith said.

But even with such a state-of-the-art software, Smith said that people should know that "typhoons are probably one of the most unpredictable weather phenomena in the world."

"Their movements can be very erratic, their intensity can fluctuate very rapidly from weak to strong," Smith said.